![]() In addition to low cost drives for PCs, cheaper and larger hard drives are also making it cheaper to add backup systems to PCs. Ziel predicts that perpendicular technology will "allow us to increase capacity about 40 percent per year for the next five or six years." "It took the drive industry 50 years to get from 5 megabytes to 500 GB," he added. The process, according Seagate spokesperson Brian Ziel "allowed use to get from 500 GB to 750 GB in about six months." Seagate has recently switched over to perpendicular technology for its current generation of products. In March 2005, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies demonstrated an areal density of 230 gigabits per square inch by using perpendicular recording technology, which the company says is "the highest areal density achieved to date based on vertical recording." Storing them vertically is a little like erecting a high-rise building, enabling engineers to pack more per inch into the total amount of disc real estate. Prior to this innovation, bits were stored on flat sections of the platter. A relatively new breakthrough is technology that increases areal density by aligning bits of data vertically or perpendicularly, instead of horizontally. Still, consumers can expect to see significant improvements in capacity over the next few years. Butler expects drive capacity to continue to grow rapidly for the next couple of years but eventually slow down. ![]() The areal density of today's drives, according to Butler, is 64 million times higher than it was back in 1956: an increase of 46 percent per year. Storage capacity for drives is measured in areal density – the number of bits per square inch of storage surface. The device, which stored five million characters (a bit short of 5 megabytes), cost $35,000 in 1956 dollars and stood 5 feet tall, a little less than 6 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep.
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