Expect a 30 Terabyte Drive from Seagate, Soon

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

According to this article from Wired, we could be reaching as high as 30 terabytes on a 3.5 inch drive in the next few years.

Their current solution to this problem is recording data perpendicular to the plane of the media. This technology, however, is expected to peak out at about 1 terabit per square inch. In the next decade, Seagate plans to hit the market with twin technologies that could fly far beyond, ultimately offering as much as 50 terabits per square inch. On a standard 3.5-inch drive, that’s equivalent to 300 terabits of information, enough to hold the uncompressed contents of the Library of Congress.

First up is heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, which uses lasers to momentarily heat the disk surface and allow the drive heads to write information. When the surface of the drive cools, the bits settle into a more stable state for longer-term reliability. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum.

But laser-powered disk drives are only one side of the coin. It will take so-called bit-pattern media to add the tail to HAMR’s head. Source: Wired

We Say: Talk about storing some digital media, hundreds of thousands of DVD’s, wonder about how many billion MP3’s you could get on one of those? They also mention a competitor to flash memory, called Probe, a non-volatile, magnetic-based media that will come in tiny form factors, but didn’t give any details.