A laser capable of being focused to a spot on a rotating disk just 80 nanometers across is what Fujitsu needed to be able to beat competitors Toshiba and Seagate in the race toward terabit areal densities. Yesterday, Fujitsu announced they'd achieved that goal.
While Toshiba and Seagate have been in competition with one another to drive up the areal density of hard drives using new perpendicular recording technology, the scientists at Fujitsu -- whose own consumer drives have had to play catch-up recently in the quality department -- have been planning to leap-frog their competitors in one fell swoop. There's a physical maximum, they found, to how densely data can be packed even with perpendicular mechanisms.
