“To increase the areal density, which is the amount of data a single platter inside a hard drive can hold, engineers have shrunk the size of bits and grains over the years. This has helped PC makers to boost the capacity of hard drives from a few megabytes to more than 100 gigabytes.Successive years of shrinkage, however, have led to magnetic grains that measure about 8 nanometers long. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)
Reducing the grains further in size could cause them to flip at room temperature and so corrupt the data–an aspect of the “superparamagnetic effect,” first identified in the mid-1990s by Stan Charap of Carnegie Mellon University. And cutting back on the number of grains inside each bit, absent further changes, would increase noise and lower reliability.”
Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:
- Fantec external SATA LD-H35SU1 and LD-H35SU2 Review @ Technic3D
- ICY DOCK MB722 5.25″ SATA Mobile Hard Drive Rack @ PC Apex
- Inching toward the NAS of our dreams @ Dan’s Data
- Surviving Disk Crashes – Part 2 @ PC Mechanic
- Sans Digital MS2C1 Drive Enclosure @ PC Mechanic
- USB 2.0 To SATA/IDE Adapter With One Touch Backup @ ThinkComputers
- Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray DVD Player @ Futurelooks
- Verbatim 4GB Store ‘n’ Go USB HD Disk @ Gamepyre
The future of hard drives is volitile

CNET looks at the future of harddrives, and how data density can continue to increase. As the article points out, the current method of storing data, after a certain density, could become volitile at room temperature, to say nothing of the temperatures seen in some overclocked systems. The next few years should be interesting for the R&D departments of major storage manufacturers.