The com

pany also currently exhibits a 2 TB desktop HDD (HN-D201RAE) which integrates just two platters. The new drive will enable HDD capacities of 3 and 4 TB. Current desktop HDDs top out at 3 TB (4x 750 GB). The company is also showing 1 TB 2.5-inch HDDs for notebooks, which integrate two 500 GB platters.

There was no exact information when the drives will be available to buy. The 3.5-inch drive, a member of Samsung's Spinpoint EcoGreen (5400 RPM) series, will be introduced as F6 generation and arrive with 32 MB cache and SATA 6 Gb. The launch date is sometime later this year. The 5400 RPM 1 TB notebook drive could debut as early as April, Germany's Heise reports.

It is quite amazing to see the HDD industry achieve these kind of data densities. I can still remember an interview I did with Seagate back in 1998, when the company said that 3.5-inch hard drives may not be able hold more than 100 GB of data in the future. We are way past that point and are told that the currently believed limit may be somewhere close to 10 GB per HDD. Beyond that point, hard drives will get optically assisted reading/writing technologies that will push capacities significantly higher.