Sony has announced that they've increased hard drive storage capacity by five times through developing a new method of writing information that's viable even for notebooks. Instead of writing via magnetics, the new system resembles current optical technologies, using a hybrid magnet/laser to write information to a disk at densities of 125GB/square inch. As we understand it, most elements of the traditional hard drive stay intact, but your current 320GB hard drive setup would see data storage reaching 1.6TB. Of course, there are no immediate plans for mass production. [itplus via electronista]