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.

Neato. The word is traveling fast across the blogosphere that Sharp Japan has announced two new Aquos Blu-ray players that push the limit on HDD size. There are two BD-HDW Blu-ray recorders in the product line-up, the BD-HDW15 and the BD-HDW20. Both units have HDMI output, a dual TV tuner so you can record two shows at the same time, Dolby DTS, a smart drive that can detect the differences between dual layer discs and single layer ones and compatibility with the company’s i-Link to make for smooth connections to other Sharp electronics. The HDW15 has 500GB of HDD space on it while the HDW20 ups it to a cool 1 terabyte of magnetized media. Supported media also include dual layer BD-R/RE discs apart from single layer discs.

How soon do you think the day will be when you can store as many movies to watch on a device smaller than the size of your average flash memory stick as you have on your iPod? 20 years? 10? If the breakthrough that was announced at the University of Pennsylvania is as big as the inventors claim it is, that day may be here before the end of the decade.

Scientists at the U of P have developed a way to create self-assembling nanowires from germanium antimony telluride. These tiny lengths are about 30 to 50 nanometers in diameter and 10 micrometers in length and are made by freezing chemicals at low temperatures, turning them into crystals. The technical stuff is hard to follow but the end result is a revolutionary new form of data storage memory that uses low power consumption (0.7mW per bit), fast read/write times (50 nanoseconds or about 1,000 times faster than the Flash-based memory devices used today) and won’t have any data corruption after 100,000 years of usage.

It was just last week when the Multimedia Card Association introduced the miCARD format to the world. Designed to work with both USB and MMC slots the miCARD can hold up to 2 GB of info presently and the designers speculate the the technology’s upper-limit will be 2 terabytes. The idea is to cram more memory onto the same size of a unit and make it more functional for dual entry ports. Not too shabby for something so small, right?

Pretec is the first company out of the gate to announce its first miCARD …

As hard drives continue to shrink in size and increase in storage space, Toshiba gets to wear the crown for how much you can store on a portable HDD. The company has had its debut in this marketplace by launching 2.5-inch 100GB and 200 GB portable HDDs that are USB 2.0 compatible. That’s about 90 DVD movies you could hold on the largest Toshiba drive, good enough so that you can take it with you on trips for the rest of your life, and its hard shell casing makes it great to stick …

One of the few notable moments in Bill Gates‘s yawn-worthy opening keynote address was the official introduction of Windows Home Server, a version of Windows designed specifically for devices like HP‘s MediaSmart Server. Added to a home network (which can include PCs and Xboxes), it will perform automatic backups, share files to every device on the network, and allow access to your stuff from any Internet-connected machine, all features previously reserved for high-end commercial networks, available in your humble abode later this year.

The HP MediaSmart Server uses Microsoft Windows Home Server as …

Today Hitachi has announced that it will be the industries first in the world to offer a 1 terabyte hard drive. The 1,000 GB drive (for those having trouble with the metric system) will be available to retail consumers in the first quarter of this year, and will come under the name ‘Deskstar 7K1000′ retailing for $399. Hitachi states that the 40 cents per gig (for those having trouble with the math) will make the larger capacity an accessible price for more customers.

This announcement comes within hours of …