Is it likely that 2.5" laptop hard drives will be available at larger capacities than 500GB any time soon?

Question

I'm looking to purchase a new hard drive for my laptop and 500GB is currently the largest available. Is it likely that larger (e.g. 750GB, 1TB?) 2.5" hard drives will be coming onto the market soon, or is 500GB touching the limits of current hard drive technology?

Answer 1

Seagate to launch its first 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive

It is also known that two Seagate external drives, which makes use of this known 2.5" 2TB disk, are already listed on couple of British retailers' websites.

Samsung and Toshiba Increase Capacity of 2.5-inch Drives to 640GB.

Both Samsung and Toshiba recently announced that they’d be among the first to release 2.5-inch 640GB hard drives for the mobile market.

Samsung’s new 640GB 2.5-inch Spinpoint M7 internal drive has a density of 516-Gigabit per square inch for each of the 320GB platters, which is a 28 percent increase per platter over it’s previous record setting 500GB internal drive. The density change allowed Samsung to up the storage capacity without adding additional platters.

On September 2nd Toshiba began shipping out their new sample 640GB 2.5-inch drive to OEMs and distributors. Given its density of 817.0 Mbit/mm2, the new drive will bring performance improvements over their previous generation of 5,400RPM drives, and will lower energy consumption by 28 percent.

WD Scorpio Blue -- 750 GB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 8 MB Cache, 5200 RPM.

We will keep seeing larger capacity (and more importantly) newer technologies...

---

Toshiba announces industry's largest single-platter 1.8in hard drive (10th September, 2009)

Toshiba has today launched four new 1.8in hard drives designed for use in portable media devices. The MK1634GAL family, available in 60GB, 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities, weighs less than 48 grams and measures approximately 5mm thick.

Answer 2

There are already larger drives. E.g. Western Digital offers 750 GB (WD7500KEVT) and 1 TB (WD10TEVT) models.