Japanese Showa Denko (SDK) has started this month commercial shipments of 2.5-inch hard disk (HD) media with storage capacity of 670 gigabytes per disk, using the seventh-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. The new 2.5-inch HD media have the world?s highest storage capacity for this size available on the market today. SDK has been mainly supplying 2.5-, and 3.5-inch sixth-generation PMR media (500GB) so far.

SDK will aim to ensure stable supply of the new high-capacity media.

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 an increase in recording density.