Hitachi Global Storage Technologies today introduced a new technology that will allow storage manufacturers to increase the hard drive size significantly over the course of two years.

The technology called Perpendicular Recording is considered to be an evolution to the world of hard drives. According to technical specifications, this new method of magnetizing particles on two opposite ends of hard drives is similar to what you find in today’s hard drives. The only difference, however, is that the magnetically charged particles will be perpendicular instead of longitudinal. This methodology results in applying more particles into a smaller disk area, thereby, increasing the overall hard drive capacity.

According to Hitachi, it will allow them to start offering hard drives as large as 1TB in a 3.5" form factor and scale their 1" micro-drives to 20GB. Both of these drives are expected to enter retail channels by 2005.

Thus far, Hitachi has declined to comment on the pricing of Perpendicular Recording based drives, but the performance and range of operations between the upcoming drives and the current generation of drives will be similar.