Go right here . No, the engineers aren't snorting it. Scientists at IBM's Alamden Research Center in San Jose need to get out more. With the new design, hard-disk drives will be able to hold up to 100 billion bits of data per square inch. Current methods would have maxed out at 20 to 40 billion bits of data per square inch, which is close to the density of disk drives in use today, IBM said.
Higher densities means higher performance as well as higher capacity, by the way.
I just wonder what we'll do for backup solutions. Oh, and thanks to Jarred for sending along the link. Apparently you don't live in California. No doubt the IDE version will be just as fast as the SCSI one, but cheaper. Not everyone is a power user.