Consumers and businesses continue to become familiar with the benefits of solid-state drives, but hard drive manufacturers haven't thrown in the towel on the tried and true hard disk drive storage technology. Seagate is working on new technology that has the potential to deliver 100TB HDD's, but the tech still hasn’t matured far enough to launch real world products yet.
Seagate believes heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology will replace the currently used perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) -- but it's possible that just a few generations of PMR HDDs will be left before HAMR HDDs take over the market.
PMR first started five years ago in 2005, when HDD manufacturers adopted perpendicular recording and left behind its linear counterpart -- the limit for 100 Gb/inch2 was no longer a problem. The new goal is 1 Tb/inch2. Mark Re, Seagate senior VP of recording media operations, told ConceivablyTech that HDDs may "top out a little north of 1 Tb/inch2."
The Seagate 750GB Momentus notebook drive currently stores 541 Gb/inch2, and it appears there will be between three to five years of PMR drives left before HAMR hit the consumer market.
If this is possible, I look forward to the prolonged lifespan of HDDs, as many consumers still aren't ready to leave behind HDD. Until price levels and manufacturers make PC buyers more comfortable with SSD, there is still a large market for HDDs. Furthermore, HAMR HDDs could help keep drives around even longer, but Seagate only has HAMR prototypes available at the moment.
Hopefully Seagate has the ability to finalize HAMR prototypes and have commercial products available within the next five years.
Samsung also recently announced a new 2TB HDD that was noteable because it can store 667GB storage per platter. There once was a time when it was believed HDDs wouldn't be able to increase past 500GB per drive. Can 100TB HDD's keep users and businesses interested, or will faster, more reliable SSDs still steal users away?
