Hitachi Ltd. announced that its hard drive division is going to push way past today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011. Researchers at the company created the world's smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.

In fact, the entire industry is reverting back to the giant magnetoresistance, or GMR hard drive head technology it used about ten years ago. The initial application of this physical effect maxed out and the industry had to replace it with tunnel magnetoresistance read heads, or TMR.

The newly developed technology is named current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistive heads, which has the current running at a perpendicular angle, instead of running parallel with the middle insulating layer. This is accomplished by eliminating the insulation between the magnetic layers and inserting a very good conductor, copper.

"We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties," said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi's data-storage unit.

The company, which bought IBM's hard drive division recently, will report at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo that it has made heads 30nm and 50nm wide that had signal-to-noise ratios of 30-40 dB.

"That's the kind of signal-to-noise ratio we need to know we can get acceptable data error rates," said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg just days ago received the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work in the field of nanotechnology. They observed a quantum mechanical effect called Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) which occurred in thin film structures composed of alternating ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic metal layers.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited their discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR), later used in technology to read data on hard disks via read-out heads that scan and register different fields of magnetization on the hard disk, in awarding them the prize.

"Not least thanks to this discovery the size of computers has been reduced dramatically. Just look at the giants from 1964. And the price for personal computers per megabyte has fallen dramatically too," said Nobel Prize committee head Per Carlson. Fert and Gruenberg "independently discovered a totally new physical effect - giant magnetoresistance or GMR" in 1988, the Novel Prize committee has found.