Comment: Still pretty amazing (Score 1) 254
An IBM hard drive research-and-developer spoke last week about their current work. He says their plattens are flat to within 90 angstroms, which means that the head is floating less than the mean free path length of air away from the disk surface. The head-to-disk distance seems to be one of the more important limiting factors of how much better disks can be, and I doubt whether we can expect too much more improvement using the current technology.
