If you thought that having a 3 TB hard drive in your PC would give you a lot of storage space, Seagate says that you haven't seen anything yet. The hard drive maker announced this week it has come up with a way to pack even more data on a drive platter that could in the future see hard drives with as much as 60 TB of space.
Seagate says that it achieved a way to fit as much as 1 terabit of storage capacity per square inch using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Seagate says that is 55 percent higher than the limit for normal commercial hard drives. At the moment, those drives can hold a maximum of 620 gigabits per square inch.
3.5 inch hard drives currently have a 3 TB limit, while the smaller 2.5 inch hard drives, typically used for notebooks, have a limit of 1 TB. The new HAMR technology will allow Seagate to create 3.5 inch hard drives with 6 TB of space. 2.5 inch hard drives could be expanded to hold 2 TB using HAMR. Seagate plans to launch the first such HAMR-based drives "later this decade".
Seagate is also looking to the far future with its HAMR tech, stating:
The technology offers a scale of capacity growth never before possible, with a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per square inch – 30 TB to 60 TB for 3.5-inch drives and 10 TB to 20 TB for 2.5-inch drives.
69 Comments
Load the comments and join the conversation!
Read the comments, ask the editors questions, show respect and join the conversation.