Although today is the Seagate or WD who owns the largest share of the market, Hitachi is preparing for a big leap in terms of storage, much higher than exists today: hard drives up to 24 TB.

Hitachi along with researchers from the Industrial Technology Development Organization and New Energy in Japan (NEDO) and the University of Tokyo, is developing a successful hard drive technology to store data at a density of 3.9 Tbit per square inch.

In essence, when you’re recording on a magnetic material, the bits (a collection of magnetized particles) are arranged end to end on the disc tray. The storage capacity is generally larger by decreasing the size of magnetic dots in which bits are lodged. Thanks to reduce the size of these points and their provision more efficient, more data you can store.

The technology will lead to an increase of up to eight times the recording density. This means that we will see hard drives with a capacity of 24 TB in a future not far away. At the moment, we should expect the official announcement of this new technology will be presented in Boston, Massachusetts, in Material Research Society Fall Meeting 2010 that begins next week, from the end of November to the beginning of December.

Via: Bit-Tech.