Hitachi today announced another step forward in packing more data into the same sized hard disks with what is now the world’s smallest read-head technology for hard disks. While others (Hitachi themselves included) are starting to turn to solid state drives or hybrid drives with advantages of moving parts, faster response times and less power consumption, Hitachi continues to make advances on the HDD front stating it continues to provide a better capacity to cost ratio than other technologies.

“Hitachi continues to invest in deep research for the advancement of hard disk drives as we believe there is no other technology capable of providing the hard drive’s high-capacity, low-cost value for the foreseeable future,” said Hiroaki Odawara, Research Director for Hitachi. “This is an achievement for consumers as much as it is for Hitachi. It allows Hitachi to fuel the growth of the ‘Terabyte Era’ of storage, which we started, and gives consumers virtually limitless ability for storing their digital content.”

According to Hitachi, they have been able to reduce the size of the recording heads to be down in the 30-50 nanometer range with their new “current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive” (CPP-GMR) technology. To help put this into perspective, the thickness of an average human hair is around 70,000 - 100,000 nanometers. This technology could bring small notebook drives with a capacity of 1TB and desktop drives with a capacity of as much as 4TB without taking up any more physical space.

Even though Hitachi is sounding their horn today, seeing this type of capacity in real products is still a few years off. Hitachi is presenting their achievement at the 8th annual Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference this week in Tokyo but doesn’t expect to have the new technology actually shipping in products until sometime in 2009, and it will likely not reach its full potential of 4TB in a desktop hard disk until 2011.