Harddrives consist of many components, but the perhaps most important from a storage perspective are the platters and the read and write heads. TDK Corporation is one of the leading manufacturers of read heads for harddrives and it has now announced a new model that can use 3.5″ platters with 640GB storage capacity. This is a significant increase from the 500GB platters of today. TDK’s new heads is currently being verified by harddrive makers and it hopes to see 2.5TB harddrives in early 2010.
By using “larger” storage platters (640GB) together with the new read heads from TDK, harddrive makers can increase storage capacity to 2.5TB with only four platters, which is the same amount as current 2TB models from Western Digital and Seagate, but then with four 500GB platters.
If they chose to go down the same path as Hitachi and install five platters they can reach storage capacities near 3.2TB.
The new heads can also be used with the smaller 2.5″ platters and can then be used with 320GB platters, compared to the 250GB of today.
The read head sits on the end of the arm hovering above the platter
