Seagate's Disk Roadmap is Exciting

After 3 years of piddling, 40%/year density improvement, the next 12 months will include a number of improvements that I think are worth noting:

• Arial density gets to 250 Gigabits per square inch. This will be done with perpendicular read-write on the media platters.
• Laptop drives will see 160 GB in 2.5" disks, which is one time to market since so many users are switching to laptops. Seagate is also targeting automobile uses, so better impact resistance is being built in.
• Desktop drives will soon see an industry high-end of 500 GB.
• Drive-level encryption will make it harder to do anything with stolen or lost laptops, a growing corporate (and government!) security concern.