60TB hard disc drives on the way. Well, in about 10 years

Seagate are boasting they’ve made a breakthrough, and have beat other manufactures to achieve an exciting milestone in storage density.

They explain: “Hard drive manufacturers increase areal density and capacity by shrinking a platter’s data bits to pack more within each square inch of disk space. They also tighten the data tracks, the concentric circles on the disk’s surface that anchor the bits. The key to areal density gains is to do both without disruptions to the bits’ magnetization, a phenomenon that can garble data.”

The good news, is they seem to have figured all this out, using HAMR technology. They comment: “[With HAMR technology] Seagate has achieved a linear bit density of about 2 million bits per inch, once thought impossible, resulting in a data density of just over 1 trillion bits, or 1 terabit, per square inch – 55 percent higher than today’s areal density ceiling of 620 gigabits per square inch.”

This means that a 3.5-inch 6 TB HDD could very well be available in the next few years, with sizes up 60 TB possible uing the new technique. However, a HDD of that elephantine size, is at least 10 years away according to the company. The biggest 3.5-inch hard drive available today is 3 TB.

“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.”

When the first 60 TB HDD comes out, we will link back to this story. I have wrote it in my dairy so I will not forget.