Hitachi promises 20 Gig hard drives in mobile phones by 2008
Hitachi execs have just been running me through the various advantages of perpendicular technology in hard drives. I’ll spare you the physics, which to be frank some of which zoomed over my head, and just say that the company reckons the technology will enable them to increase capacity of hard disks by between 20-40% per year.
The big news for us mobile phone addicts is that we should see a one inch Hitachi drive (codename Mikey) in a phone with a 8/10 gigabyte capacity by the end of the year. Hitachi then promises that by 2008 the one inch drive will have capacity of around 20 Gigabytes which for some of us it will mean it is time to ditch the digital audio player.
The company is also expecting large hard drives on phones to archive video, possibly taken direct from a digital TV source transmitted to the handset. Hitachi is very excited about the market but admits that at the current time it really can’t say how huge the hard disk market for phones will be.
Interestingly the company says that it won’t go smaller than one inch disks leaving the smaller capacity market to flash memory producers and other hard disk makers.
