This thursday Seagate Technology presented their research results on American Physical Society (APS) and the results were astonishing. With the technology that Seagate is currently developing they aim to create harddrives with over 100 Terabytes of storage space.
On one square inch it would fit 50 Terabits (6,25 Terabyte) which would mean that 3,5 million high quality images, 2800 music cd’s or 1600 hours of television could fit in an area of a coin (30,61mm). This would give us 49TB on one side of the disc and 98TB on both of the sides. Harddrives today often uses 1-5 discs which would mean that we would have a harddrive of 490TB!
This new technology is called Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and with it one can reach higher density by heating up the magnetic disc with a laser beam or with some other sort of energy source at the same time as the data is stored. Today’s discs has a density of a maximum of 70 gigabyte per square inch and the world’s, at today’s date, largest harddrive can store 400GB of data.
What also makes this technique worth investing in is that the manufacturing costs will be about the same as with today’s harddrives. The HAMR technology will at firsrt be used on harddrives with 1 Terabits density per square inch, but they do not expect these harddrives to reach the market until around 2010.
This sounds very promising though and we hold our thumbs that Seagate’s research team will manage to complete this technology within a future near as possible. And that they send us a review example a couple of years in advance…
Source: Xbit-Labs
