That breakthrough is managing to squeeze 1 terabyte (1 trillion bits) of data into a square inch or space, effectively opening the way for larger hard drives over the coming years beyond the 3TB maximum we currently enjoy. How much of an improvement does this storage milestone offer? Current hard drives max out at around 620 gigabytes per square inch, meaning Seagate has improved upon that by over 50%. However, that’s just the beginning.
The 1 terabyte barrier has been broken due to the use of a new type of recording known as heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR. We first heard about HAMR back in 2009 when Seagate started discussing their research into laser heating. Then in October last year TDK introduced the tech.
HAMR works by adding a small laser in the drive head that heats the surface of the platter. By doing so the magnetic field intensifies and it’s possible to pack many more bits into the same area.
Initially the use of HAMR in Seagate’s drives should see their capacity double. So a 3.5-inch drive will be offered at up to 6TB and a 2.5-inch drive at up to 2TB. The HAMR tech does scale very well though, with the upper limit eventually being 10 terabits per square inch. At that density we would see 3.5-inch drives with 60TB of capacity and 2.5-inch drives would max out at 20TB.
With the introduction of HAMR, Seagate has effectively guaranteed hard drives will continue to play a role in the storage market for the next decade. Within 5 years we could all be carrying around double-digit terabyte drives in our laptops.
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