In this file photo Hitachi Ltd's President Kazuo Furukawa speaks to reporters during a news conference in Tokyo April 3, 2006.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

BEIJING, Oct. 15 (Xinhuanet) -- Hitachi Ltd. says multimedia users need not worry about a storage capacity ceiling of hard drives soon, according to media reports Monday.

The company says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.

Hitachi claims it has designed the first working versions in its labs of giant magneto-resistive heads. The company will report at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference Monday in Tokyo that it has made heads 30nm and 50nm wide.

The feat revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week.

Capacities of hard drives have grown as researchers have crammed more bits of data closer together while also making the heads sensitive enough to read the data.

The industry looks to new technologies every time physical limitations kick in, and GMR was one of the breakthroughs that led to the fastest growth rate in the early 2000s, allowing hard drives to double in capacity every year.

As GMR-based heads maxed out, the industry replaced the technology in recent years with an entirely different kind of head. Yet researchers are predicting that technology will soon run into capacity problems, and now GMR is making a comeback as the next-generation successor.

"It means the industry is making good progress to advance the capacity of disk drives and move to smaller form factors," said John Rydning, an analyst at market research firm IDC.

A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.

(Agencies)