by Anton Shilov
07/28/2006 | 10:39 PM
Western Digital Corp., the world’s second largest maker of hard disk drives (HDDs), has announced that it is in volume production of hard drives that feature perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) media. As projected, the first drives from WD to employ the tech are 2.5” products for mobile computers.
<%BANNER[article]%>“WD’s implementation of PMR technology in a mobile application, our fastest-growing high-volume market, expands capacities for these storage-hungry applications. These new high-density drives also are an outcome of our focused R&D investments over recent years that will bring high value to our customers worldwide,” said John Coyne, WD’s president and chief operating officer.
Western Digital currently produces 80GB platters for its 2.5” WD Scorpio hard disk drives for notebooks and other applications requiring small form-factors. For some reason, the company did not unveil, when and whether such platters are to be used to make 160GB HDDs, but claimed, that they would be used for “next-generation Scorpio” products.
Currently WD Scorpio family includes 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 100GB and 120GB models with 5400rpm motors and 2MB or 4MB cache buffers. WD Scorpio use Parallel ATA or Serial ATA interfaces.
WD launches production of hard drives with perpendicular magnetic recording technology several months after the rivals. While WD cannot offer capacities as large as 750GB, unlike Seagate technology, the company believes that the approach to perpendicular recording should be cautious and the appropriate media should go into mass production once the yields are maximally high.
Perpendicular recording gets its name from the vertical alignment of data bits on the plane of the disk, which takes less room in contrast to the horizontal orientation of today’s longitudinal recording technology. To be accurately recorded and read, the more closely-packed perpendicular bits also require a closer association between the read/write head and the recording media.