A strategic forecast of the Japanese company Showa Denko reveals that the comany will start manufacturing it's 7th generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), hard disk drive platters. The company's name might not ring a bell, but it supplies about 30% of the HDD market with their platters and has large customers like Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba meaning that the company is on the forefront of HDD technology. The 7th generation platters will bring 650GB per platter by 2013 for 2.5" disks and using newer techniques the company hopes to bring 1TB platters for 2.5" formfactor drives by 2016.
These new techniques are thermally-assisted magnetic recording (TAMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) which the company hopes to use to increase platter capacities from 2014 and onwards. This should result in 750 GB platters by 2014 and 1 TB platters at the end of the companies roadmap, 2016. It's reasonable to suspect that capacity of 3.5" formfactor disks will scale with the same ratio and that by those years we see multi TerraByte laptops and Ultrabooks.
