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"  Reports of the Nobel Prize in physics being awarded for Giant Magnetoresistance dumbed down the science to the foundations of the iPod. But the confusing mechanics of the hard drive belies its undeniable usefulness in the world of electronics. For the record, Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) is not a band of 15-ft.-tall mutants who have joined together to save the world from a diabolical villain with the power to influence metal. But you could be forgiven for thinking so, since the term is about as arcane as any that the dual disciplines of physics and computer science have produced. Despite its gargantuan-sounding proportions, the GMR principle is all about the infinitesimally small bits of information squeezed onto hard drives--and how to read them. Most people in the geekosphere are familiar with Moore&amp;#039;s Law, which observes that the number of transistors on a CPU will double every two years, but not everyone has heard of the corresponding law in the field of data storage. Named Kryder&amp;#039;s Law, after Carnegie Mellon professor Mark Kryder, it predicts regular exponential growth in hard-drive capacity (click here for my Q&amp;amp;amp;A with Kryder). Since the introduction of the hard drive in 1956, when the 1-ton IBM RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) included 5MB of storage, drives have experienced a 50-million-fold increase in capacity. In the early 90s, desktop drives started surging into the 1GB range, and now drives max out at around 1TB (terabyte). On Monday, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) announced that it expects to be shipping 4TB desktop and 1TB laptop drives by 2011. Meeting that news was a chorus of yawns all around from the techno-bloggers (&amp;quot;Hitachi announced 4TB HDDs by 2011. So?&amp;quot; read the headline on Ubergizmo), who instantly went back to obsessing about iPhone hacks and Japanese robots. Unfair, I say! Hard drives are the most underappreciated technology in the world of computing. It takes some pretty sophisticated tricks at the microscopic--and even the subatomic--level to pack all those bits onto the spinning platters that hold everything from our music collections to pictures to PowerPoint presentations. Every time it seems that those disks are carrying as much information as is allowed by the laws of physics, engineers find a fascinating new method to squeeze out more capacity. In 2005, when the horizontally aligned bits on high-capacity drives were becoming crowded, Toshiba (followed by pretty much every drive manufacturer) upended the bits to a perpendicular orientation to the surface of the platter, aligning them like standing dominoes to squeeze in more per square inch. Hitachi&amp;#039;s announcement about drive heads was a good deal more esoteric than that: Hard-drive engineers have essentially found a way to redesign and shrink the read/write head (the official name for the technology is &amp;quot;Current-Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magnetoresistive,&amp;quot; or CPP-GMR, drive heads) to allow for smaller perpendicular bits. And the GMR effect is not new. In fact, this year&amp;#039;s Nobel Prize for physics went to France&amp;#039;s Albert Fert and Germany&amp;#039;s Peter Grunberg, whose research into GMR in the late 1980s brought about the first real-world application of nanotechnology. In short, GMR is a quantum-level effect that allows hard-drive manufacturers to use magnetic fields to exploit the subatomic spin of particles. The discovery of GMR launched an entirely new field of applied physics known as spin-based electronics, or &amp;quot;spintronics.&amp;quot;  In January, Hitachi announced it would build the first consumer terabyte hard drive, and now the company is ready to quadruple that storage capacity by 2011. Given the complexity and difficulty of the subject, I imagine the reason Hitachi GST is making announcements about technologies two to four years down the pipeline is to piggyback on the Nobel and take advantage of the only public attention that GMR is ever likely to get. But the confusing mechanics of the hard drive belies its undeniable usefulness in the world of electronics. Over the past few years, CPUs from Intel and AMD have rolled into the world of gigahertz calculations and split into multiple cores. Consequently, computer users are now buying PCs with awesome processing power that doesn&amp;#039;t always translate into improved real-world performance in tasks such as surfing the Internet, looking at pictures and playing music and movies. But the advent of 100-plus-gigabyte computers has had a huge effect on the way we use our machines, moving them into the realm of entertainment devices, swallowing huge quantities of music, movies and family videos and photos. Whenever people come to me looking for guidance on purchasing a new computer, my advice is this: Buy as much processor as you think you need, but be sure to buy more hard drive than you&amp;#039;d ever imagine. That&amp;#039;s because once you get into consuming and producing music and video, you&amp;#039;ll start to see those gigabytes fill up awfully quick. Plus, it doesn&amp;#039;t cost much to overestimate--going from a 320GB drive to a 500GB drive on a standard Dell desktop computer only adds about $80. And modern operating systems and software are veritable hard-drive hogs--a Microsoft Windows Vista install requires 15GB of free disk space. Still, despite their massive capacities and apparently unlimited room for improvement, there is reason to question the future relevance of our spinning platter workhorses in home PCs. On the bottom end, flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are chasing HDDs up the capacity ladder--current SSDs have capacities of up to 128GB. On the top end, online storage providers will start to seem like reasonable alternatives as offerings approach infinite capacity and super-high-bandwidth fiberoptic connections to the home become the norm. Meanwhile, if our Breakthrough Award-winning $99 Zonbu laptop is any indication, we may be on the verge of a new era of slim-client computing. Nevertheless, hard-disk drives have maintained their primacy in the PC thus far because they have routinely kept pace with computer users&amp;#039; needs and they are relatively cheap solutions for storing tons of data. Current 1TB drives sell for less than $350 and can hold up to 200 DVD-quality movies (far more if you compress them). And as we step gingerly into the world of downloading hi-def, that sort of localized capacity will become even more important. So even though the rest of the world may not get too excited about the soldierly progress of the hard-disk drive, I&amp;#039;m willing to give it a column&amp;#039;s-worth of respect. Current-Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magnetoresistance may seem like a hopelessly impenetrable piece of computer science (except to the people who hand out Nobel Prizes), but it&amp;#039;s advances like this that are enabling our DVRs to record Heroes for us while we&amp;#039;re out with friends, and that allow a computer to act as the repository for a collection of music and movies. Because there&amp;#039;s no such thing as too much room for your stuff. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a2194/4226779/>