Talking at the Information Terminal Festival 2009 last week, Hitachi Global Storage general manager for Planning & Strategic Marketing, Tetsuya Kokubo has provided an outlook for the increase of platter storage density. According to Kokubo, from the current 400Gb per square inch, the market will go to 600 Gb/in2 around year-end or in early 2010, reach 1.2 Tb in the second half of 2011 and top 2.4 Tb/in2 in 2013 or 2014.

The estimates suggest that single-platter 3.5-inch hard drives will reach a capacity of 750GB in the next six-nine months, with four-platter 3TB models coming in the same time frame (currently the highest-capacity 3.5-inch HDD has 2TB ). Going forward, 4 - 5.5TB HDDs should arrive in 2011, while the 10TB mark would be broken in 2013/2014.