The EE Times has an article up about a major shake-up in the works for Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor and all my other favorite manufacturers of Hard Disk Drives. This comes as no great surprise to me, since the underlying technology that makes HDDs work has evolved significantly since its introduction in the 1950s while remaining fundamentally the same. But increases in areal densities will necessitate changes in the way HDDs are made. The linked article seems to think standing bits on their ends is the way to do it. A better explanation of the technology (with pictures!) is available from Google, via their cache of an ExtremeTech page which is no longer available from ExtremeTech themselves. That same page has an overview of HDD tech that was future-cool in 2001, and where it was last year.