Hitachi Has Plans for 5TB HDD by 2010

The Japanese company announced plans to have a 5TB hard drive by 2010. The technology used, which they call "current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance" will allow 3.5" drives to push their data density over 1TB per square inch.

It’s not clear whether or not these drives will be a simple proof of concept, or be available to consumers for purchase, but we’ll no doubt be able to purchase a similar capacity drive sometime in the future. Even if a technology like SSD may be the future, NAND chips will have a hard time catching up.

Solid-state disks may be eating into the territory of traditional hard drives, particularly in laptops, but that doesn’t mean spinning platters are on their last legs – particularly not at Hitachi.

The Japan-based company has stated that it plans to have a commercial 3.5-inch hard drive on the market that can hold 5TB by 2010. It aims to achieve this with write heads that use something called current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR).