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4 GB Microdrive by fall 2003
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By Jørgen Sundgot, Monday 6 January 2003  
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According to Hitachi, the company will deliver 4 GB of storage capacity on a one-inch disk by this fall, courtesy of Pixie Dust. And, it'll be in CompactFlash Type II format.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), a new joint venture between IBM and Hitachi, today announced plans to squeeze four gigabytes of data onto the 1-inch Microdrive, known as the world's smallest hard disk drive. With considerable advances in miniaturization technology thanks to the Pixie Dust concept originally developed by IBM, HGST engineers have overcome magnetic recording challenges associated with developing hard disk drives of this size, and expects the 4 GB Microdrive to be available in the Fall of 2003.
The new drive will use ultra-miniaturized components, including a new read-write head that is half the size of its predecessor and results in a 40-percent decrease in the height at which the head travels above the disk platter. Analogous to a Boeing 747 airplane flying one millimeter above the surface of the earth, the Microdrive's new head technology, called the femto slider head, is so small that it is equivalent in size to a grain of table salt.
Hitachi engineers have also increased the tracks per inch to accommodate the Microdrive's areal density of more than 60 billion bits of data per square inch. This areal density required mechanical tolerances and accuracies to be significantly tighter in order to maintain the Microdrive's data integrity and reliability.
The areal density of the 4 GB Microdrive is made possible by using a new five-layer version of Hitachi's patented "Pixie Dust" media technology. The new data storage technology takes a three-atom-thick layer of the element ruthenium, a precious metal similar to platinum, and sandwiches it between three magnetic layers. Technically referred to as antiferromagnetically coupled media, the ruthenium/magnetic layers enable data recording at ultra-high densities while maintaining data integrity.
Other improvements to the new Microdrive include a data transfer rate increase that represents a 50 percent improvement from the previous-generation Microdrive, which Hitachi engineers go as far as to estimate are faster than all competitive solid-state data storage products available today.
According to Hitachi, HP and Eastman-Kodak are among the companies that are currently evaluating the 4 GB Microdrive, to be available in a CompactFlash Type II card format. The two companies respectively have their handhelds and digital cameras in mind when evaluating the new Microdrive, albeit no current handhelds from HP sport an integrated CF Type II expansion slot.
Hitachi said the 4 GB Microdrive is expected to be available in the fall of 2003, while its pricing would be announced later this year. Meanwhile, the company continues to offer the Microdrive in capacities ranging from 340 MB to 1 GB.
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