Hitachi Hard Drive with Half a Brain

I am so old that I can remember when PC’s boasted having one kilobyte (1kb) of storage and I can still recall placing a special order, and waiting weeks for 1Mb hard disc drive, which I was convinced that I could never fill in my lifetime… So it is with a world-weary shrug that I learn than Hitachi is planning to market a 5 terabyte hard drive, probably within the next 18 months.

What makes this particularly interesting, not to say a bit spooky, is that Hitachi’s Dr Yoshihiro Shiroishi reckons that just two of them will be need to match the storage capacity of the human brain, which he estimates around 10Gb. Frankly I find that hard to believe; a lifetime of memories in a mere 10Tb, when a 2–hour movie swallows up 5 gigabytes? There must be some pretty impressive compression involved… Comparing digital storage system with the analogue workings of the old grey-matter is a bit misleading, but back to that Hitachi drive. It uses something called CPP-GMR or Current Perpendicular to Plane Giant Magnetoresistance, since you ask to squeeze in up to 1Tb of data into every square inch of recording surface. So, just in case Shiroishi-san is right, and someone comes up with a way of connecting brains to hard drives it’s comforting to know you’ll only need a couple of these new drives to backup all of your memories.