The push for storage devices with greater data density has led to a breakthrough in hard drive engineering that allows bits to be stacked vertically and horizontally. This is in contrast to the horizontal method employed in all commercial hard drives thus far.

Seagate Technology LLC is the first company to ship a notebook hard drive with this new technology; other manufacturers will follow soon. Its capacity is 160 GB, which is 33% larger than what was previously their largest offering. Within three to five years, the advent of hard drives with vertical and horizontal data stacking is expected to expand memory capacity five times over current limits.

Read the article. (BusinessWeek)