Japanese public broadcaster Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), working with Sony, has developed a prototype 1-in. disk drive that is thinner and has more storage capacity than similar drives on the market today. NHK and its partners have so far developed working prototypes of the drives using perpendicular recording technology. Miyashita declined to say when the drives are expected to go on sale.

The new drives are 2.5 millimeters thick and store 10GB of data. This makes them half the thickness of the 1-in. drives sold by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. The highest-capacity 1-in. drives currently on sale store 6GB.

Current technology, longitudinal recording, aligns the data bits horizontally, parallel to the surface of the disk. In contrast, perpendicular recording aligns the bits vertically, perpendicular to the disk, which allows additional room on a disk to pack more data, thus, enabling higher recording densities.

Several companies have announced that they will sell drives using perpendicular recording technology, including HGST, Toshiba Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd.

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Know more about perpendicular recording technology here (very nice flash presentation!)

Perpendicular Animation

via i4u

Seagate has a 8GB drive here

http://www.slashphone.com/70/2050.html