Seagate is now of the leading harddrive manufacturers and the storage density of modern harddrives has been increasing at a rapid rate lately. The latest technology for doing so is called Perpendicular Recording, but even this technology is expected to reach its max at about 1 terabit per square-inch. This storage density would make it possible to create 3.5″ harddrive platters with a capacity at over 430GB. Use four or five of these platters in a single harddrive and you get a pretty impressive capacity. But Seagate is already working on considerably more efficient technologies for the next decade. Bit Pattering and HARM are two of the technologies which Seagate claims will make it possible to store up to 50 terabit data per square-inch in 2012.
This would lead to the possibility to manufacture harddrive platters with 300Tb storage capacity and create harddrives with over 100TB of storage depending on how many platters you use. We constantly hear about new storage technologies but this still sounds very promising as Wired has visited Seagate’s R&D lab and received information about the future. You may question whether we actually need these kind of capacities in five years already, but at the same time there will be no problem with filling them when they do arrive.
