Japanese Showa Denko (SDK) has started this month shipment of 3.5-inch hard disk (HD) media for storage capacity of 1.5-1.8 terabyte (TB) per platter, which feature the world's highest storage capacity for this size available on the market today.

SDK's 3.5-inch 1.5-1.8 TB HD media have been adopted into Toshiba's hard disk drive (HDD) for near-line storage, "MG07ACA Series," which is the first HDD to achieve total storage capacity of 14 TB with Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). SDK has started supplying its 3.5-inch HD media for this application, using the ninth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. In 2005, SDK became the first to manufacture and sell PMR-technology-based HD media.

HDDs are widely used for recording digital data, and their shipment volumes for use in data centers have been increasing in recent years, reflecting exponential growth in generated data in line with the progress of cloud computing. HD media are key components of HDDs, significantly influencing their storage capacity, and SDK has been speedily launching highest-level-capacity HD media.