New Sony technology to increase hard drive storage fivefold

Sony has unveiled a new technology that promises to greatly increase hard drive capacities, even in laptops. Instead of a traditional magnetic read/write head, Sony’s new drives will use a hybrid of magnetic and optical technology allowing for a much greater density of data on the disk.

Much of the hard drive will remain the same. The most significant change is that data will now be written to the disk using a laser. Lasers are much more precise than magnetic heads, allowing them to squeeze many more bits into a given area - 5 times more, Sony claims.

This development will result in some huge hard drive sizes. A 320GB drive today would turn into a 1.6TB drive using the new technology while the size and other factors remain the same. Sony’s development will be a relief to laptop users who are already running out of room on their hard drives. There is no timetable for release set as of now, but we hope Sony pushes this technology out soon. We’d love to see terabyte hard drives in our laptops.