By Cara Cunningham
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 3:28 PM PT, Dec 30, 1996
IBM on Monday demonstrated in its labs a computer hard disk drive that
features a density of 5
gigabits per square inch, nearly three times that of the industry's
highest density drive today.
The company demonstrated in its Advanced Magnetic Recording Laboratory in
San Jose, Calif.,
data being written to and read from this high-density drive, which uses
an advanced version of
IBM's magneto-resistive (MR) recording heads, according to company
officials.
While the drive has only been tested in laboratory environments, IBM
officials said they expect
such high-density devices to be available within two to three years. The
company also
anticipates producing drives with 10-gigabit-per-square-inch density
around the turn of the
century.
Currently, IBM produces the highest-density drive on the market; the
2.5-inch Travelstar VP
that has two disks and is designed for the company's subnotebook
computers, holding up to
1.6GB of data, officials said. A 5-gigabit-per-square-inch version of
this drive in the same
9.5mm packaging would hold more than 6GB of data, they said, and a
nine-disk, 3.5-inch drive
of this density used in a server could hold up to 55GB of data.