My husband is working towards his Ph.D. in Physics and one of the things he's working with is how hard drive storage works, thin magnetic films, and nanotechnology stuff.
Anyways, one of the things that he's testing / developing / researching (not sure exactly what the word is) is changing how bits are stored on a hard drive. He's mentioned something about perpendicular media (or something) to me before, but one of the people from his lab found this
link from Hitachi. It was just too funny to pass up. Very cheesy cartoon, but you do learn stuff from it
note: his group collaborates a lot with hitachi and other major companies - they aren't rivals or anything.