Perpendicular Recording

On Monday Seagate Technology announced that it is shipping the Seagate Momentus 5400.3— the new 2.5-inch notebook PC drive featuring the addition of perpendicular recording for elevated levels of hard drive data density and capacity for notebook users. The Momentus 5400.3 offers up to 160GB of capacity and delivers 132 gigabits per square inch on the 5,400-rpm drive. Seagate also plans to apply perpendicular recording to its 7,200-rpm Momentus disk drives and to its smaller device 1-inch drives and desktop-oriented 3.5-inch products.

This is a radical departure from traditional longitudinal recording. The perpendicular recording places data bits on the end of the disk instead of flat to the surface without adding any extra requirement on power consumption or spin speed. This enables more bits to move under the drive head in the same amount of time and allows a boost in its performance by removing any extra workload on the drive. In this way by increasing the capacity to aerial disk speed without increasing the disk's component count, wear and tear on the drive is significantly lessened. This provides more safety against any kind of thermal decay.

This is very good news for Laptop users who can now carry more hard drive around without sweating too much.