Moore’s Law states that the amount of transistors that can be placed on a circuit will double every two years. Intel’s announcement means they’re going to be able to keep developing technology that proves the law. Previously, transistors were placed on a circuit on a flat surface. This new technology means that is no longer the case. Therefore, there can be more transistors on each circuit.

Intel says that the costs should be minimal, both in terms of production and in terms of operation. The chips won’t cost much more to make than they currently do, and the heat production should not be all that much higher than it is with current chip technology.

The minimal costs in terms of production are outweighed by the benefits of this technology. The chips made using the new 22NM process and the 3d transistor technology will have lower voltage, lower leakage and more speed.

These chips will be used in desktops and laptops to begin with, probably in early 2012. They will increase performance even in larger data centers. But the real benefit of this technology will be in the mobile market. That is where Intel really needs to make strides if it wants to stay relevant. This technology will do it for them. It will mean a lot more power in the smaller footprint of mobile phones and tablets.

Seagate is also putting more power in a smaller package. They are now able to put one TB per platter in a 3.5 inch hard drive. This means that the hard drives have an impressive capacity of 625 GB per square inch. Within a few months you will be able to buy a 3.5” 3 TB hard drive. You can back up all of your data onto small hard drives that will fit just about anywhere.

You will be able to get the new drives in 1, 1.5, 2 and 3 TB sizes. Seagate has not yet released pricing on the drives.

Seagate and Intel are both thinking that smaller is better. This is because the trend to smaller and more mobile technologies is driving the industry as consumers become more likely to spend their money on laptops than desktops. Tablets and smartphones are becoming ever more commonplace. These two advancements show that companies are aware of the fact that people want to fit more power into smaller packages.

How have your computing habits changed in the last while? Are you going smaller? Do you find yourself using mobile devices to do tasks that you used to do on a desktop? Do you use a desktop or a laptop as your main computer?

At current status, my hard drive is sufficient for my needs. Of course I keep transferring files to a CD or DVD every now and then so you could say I haven’t really tested the limits of my drive yet. Then today I read a news article that said that hard drive manufacturer is going to introduce a Barracuda hard drive with a capacity of 1.5 Terabytes (TB). That’s 1.5 trillion bytes of data all in one disk. The disk should be available by August.

I must confess the idea of a disk that can hold that much data in it is a little beyond my comprehension at present. I tried to calculate how many movies I could fit at 700 MB a file but came up short. It will definitely be a big number. Still, if I put together my entire multimedia collection, I’m sure it’s close to that number so it’s not that inconceivable in terms of size.

The primary advantage is the expanded storage so no more running to put things on CD because you’re running out of space. At least not for a while. An added benefit of this hard drive is that it will obviously make the lesser capacity models cheaper so if you’re planning to buy a new hard drive, I’d suggest you wait for a month or two.

The biggest disadvantage of such a huge capacity is the sheer amount of data you would lose if your drive crashed. Still, as long as you do regular backups, you should be safe. What I’m curious to know is just what you would do with a 1.5 Terabyte hard drive? Store music, movies, games, software or something else? Let me know.

This is why experts suggest to either overwrite the hard drive with random data before formatting it or running tools like Eraser to erase all data on the hard drive.

The HDD Low Level Format Tool will low level format a hard drive erasing the whole disk surface in the process which has the result, that it is impossible to restore data afterwards. It supports SATA, IDE, SCSI, USB, FIREWIRE and Big drives (LBA-48) and the most popular manufacturers Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum and Western Digital.

I did not try that hard drive software yet because I do not have a spare hard drive lying around that I could use to test it with and I did not want to format one of my hard drives just for the sake of testing it. If any of you do test the software let me know about the results please. Running a recovery tool like Recuva after formatting the hard drive should show us if the data is really not recoverable.