At the IDEMA DISKON show in Santa Clara, California, Seagate demonstrated a magnetic recording device with a whopping 421 Gbits per square inch density.  To put that in perspective, the company recently announced 160GB 5400.3 2.5" perpendicular notebook drives that have an areal density of 135 Gbits per square inch. Toshiba, the current commercial density leaders, recently demonstrated 2.5" hard drives with areal densities of 188 Gbits per square inch.

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins claims "Breakthroughs in areal density are enabling the digital revolution and clearly indicate that hard drives can sustain their advantage to meet the world's insatiable demand for storage across a wide range of market segments."

According to the press release put out by Seagate, the company claims a 1.8" disk drive produced on the same 421 Gbits per square inch technology would result in a 275GB hard drive. 2.5" drives on the density would level out around 500GB, and fully fledged 3.5" hard drives would be able to house a density of 2.5 terabytes.  Perhaps even more exciting is that Seagate "anticipates that solutions at these density levels could begin to emerge in 2009."

The leap to such densities would result in a three-fold increase of current areal densities. However, Seagate isn't alone in this race.  Earlier this year Hitachi put out a press release claiming we would see 1TB holographic drives from the company before the end of the year.  However, both companies use Komag as the primary supplier of their high density platters -- and it should not be a surprise if we see 1TB hard disk drives as well.