A TDK chart paves the road to 3 TB hard drives by November.
Softpedia reports that hard drive head manufacturer TDK released a chart revealing hard drive capacity updates for 2010. The chart indicates that-- for 3.5-inch HDDs--the company is moving from 500 GB per platter to 640 GB per platter.
This update means that hard drive manufacturers can now crank out HDDs with 2.5 TB storage capacities (using four platters), and five-platter HDDs offering a whopping 3 TB of storage.
The chart indicates that TDK plans to launch the update next month, with the new HDDs appearing on the market by November.
As for the smaller 2.5-inch form factor, hard drive manufacturers will be able to use the just-launched 375 GB platters as soon as this month. This will be a small bump up from the previous 320 GB platters, however storage makers will now be able to manufacture HDDs with 750 GB of storage using two platters.
According to TechConnect, 2.5-inch HDDs with 750 GB are expected to hit the market sometime this October. Still, with the release of SSDs, are mechanical drives a dying technology?

They'll certainly find a market in enterprise use, still the largest market for hardware. And I can imagine that workstations and certain home theater PC's could use that much storage.
And to reply to the question in the article: I don't think magnetic storage is dying just yet. It will have a massive pricing advantage for years to come and capacity is still far ahead. The best SSD's manage 1TB, but are nearly unaffordable. Meanwhile, dirt cheap 3TB drives are being prepared...
SSD's are great as a boot drive, maybe as a primary drive in higher end systems in a few years time, but I think that it will be at least a year or 3 before magnetic storage will start dying.
They'll certainly find a market in enterprise use, still the largest market for hardware. And I can imagine that workstations and certain home theater PC's could use that much storage.
And to reply to the question in the article: I don't think magnetic storage is dying just yet. It will have a massive pricing advantage for years to come and capacity is still far ahead. The best SSD's manage 1TB, but are nearly unaffordable. Meanwhile, dirt cheap 3TB drives are being prepared...
SSD's are great as a boot drive, maybe as a primary drive in higher end systems in a few years time, but I think that it will be at least a year or 3 before magnetic storage will start dying.