Seagate announced this week that it's solved the first problem on how to significantly expand the amount of hard drive storage space available to consumers. The hard drive maker's labs in California and Minnesota have managed to store an entire terabit of data on a single square inch, paving the way for a new device that will boast twice the capacity of modern drives by 2020.
Seagate chalked up its achievement to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, which was developed by Fujitsu back in 2006 alongside now standard perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). How to store one terabit per square inch has long been hard drive manufacturers' white whale. The Cupertino company believes it's one step closer to conquering the beast.
"The growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity," said Mark Re, senior vice president of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate. "Hard disk drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content."
Unsatisfied with modern hard drive's 3TB limit, Seagate has long been researching how to create a 3.5-inch drive capable of storing 60 terabytes of information. Considering the increased focus on downloadable content across myriad consumer electronics and the perpetual desire among technophiles for more storage space, what sounds like overkill now could very well be considered "just enough" in another 10 years. Seagate hopes to release a 60TB drive by 2030.
