Japanese Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) has started commercial shipments of 2.5-inch hard disk (HD) media with storage capacity of 500 gigabytes per disk, using the sixth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

The company's new 2.5-inch HD media have the world?s highest storage capacity for this size available on the market today. SDK has already commercialized 1.89-, 2.5-, and 3.5-inch fifth-generation PMR media.

Demand for high-capacity HD media is growing for such applications as PCs, cloud computing and digital electric appliances. To ensure speedy and stable deliveries of HD media, SDK completed capacity expansion at its site in Singapore in June this year.

As a result, SDK's total HD media production capacity has been increased to 27 million units a month since July this year.

SDK is the world's largest independent HD media supplier.

Compared with the conventional technology that stores magnetic data on a horizontal plane of the HD media, the PMR technology enables vertical magnetic recording, resulting in a dramatic increase in recording density.