New TB Hard Drives - How Do They Work?

Seagate hard drive manufacturers are planning to begin shipping a hard disk drive with a 1TB storage capacity sometime during the first half of 2007. Even though they got beat out by Hitachi who will be shipping their hard disk by April 07, I am wondering where they are going to price it. Hitachi’s is going in around 40 cents per GB, which is pretty good. At that price you could easily buy 2 of them and set them up as a RAID 1 or a mirror. DTI’s RAID data recovery engineers recommend RAID 1 over RAID 0 because of reliability.

The switch to a new data recording technology called perpendicular recording is the key to enabling some big jumps in storage capacity on hard disk drives. The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used until recently in most drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. In longitudinal drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disk, but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disk. The result of this new arrangement is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk’s surface and so more particles can be crammed onto the disk.

Seagate’s current 750GB drive and the planned 1TB drive are based on perpendicular recording. DTI hard disk recovery research and development has been working with perpendicular recording drives since they came out. Mechanically they are the same, but the way data is stored on them and how the operating system interacts with these high capacity hard disks is the real challenge.

The fact is no matter how good they make the drives, they will ultimately fail at some point or another. Take a look at Dick Correa’s article on hard drives and learn about mean time to failure.

As always if you have any questions about hard disk recovery please call Michael Stankard at 727-251-2058.