Showa Denko Ships World Largest Storage HD Media

Showa Denko announced on Monday the firm started commercial shipment of 3.5-inch hard disk (HD) media with storage capacity of 334 gigabytes per disk using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. The storage capacity is the largest in the world. The firm uses aluminium HD this time, which started commercial production of 2.5-inch glass HD media with storage capacity of 160 gigabytes in April 2007.Showa Denko produces HD at 4 plants in Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. The total output capacity was 15.75 million disks per month at the end of December 2006 and is scheduled to expand to 24 million disks per month by the end of 2008.The firm opened a new factory in Singapore at the end of 2006 to organize the best productive system for each level of storage capacity, while the firm hasn’t revealed the productive site of its newest HD media. The firm has also advanced technical development to meet HD users’ demand and realized commercial production of HD media with PMR technology in June 2005 for the first time in the world.Demand for high-capacity HD media is growing year by year in line with increasing shipment of HDD recorders that can record digital terrestrial broadcasting TV programs, and personal computers that can store and edit moving pictures.