Samsung Packs 2TB into Smaller Hard Drive

Whether it’s inside a personal computing device or an enterprise-class storage system, density, in an age when physical space is at a premium, is just as important as the total amount of capacity being made available in a storage device.

With that in mind, the Samsung hard disk drive (HDD) unit of Seagate, which Seagate acquired in 2011, has begun shipping a 2TB hard disk drive that fits three disks inside a 2.5-in drive that is only 9.5 millimeters wide.

According to Dave Frankovich, senior product line manager for the Samsung HDD division, the Spinpoint M9T is the latest example of a wave of innovation that is coming to magnetic storage that will address everything from the demand for more video on personal computing devices to the needs of large enterprise IT organizations struggling to meet the storage demands generated by Big Data applications.

In the last couple of years, the physical space that a hard drive requires has become a significant issue. The good news is that, with advances such as shingled magnetic storage and solid-state disk drives, the amount of data that can be stored in a specific physical space is increasing. Whether those advances will keep pace with storage demand that appears to be continuing to grow at exponential rates is still in doubt.

But the good news is that a lot of these advances in storage should start showing up in systems in 2014. From the perspective of many IT organizations, these just might provide the right amount of storage density required just in the nick of time.