If you had a hard drive sized at 60 terabytes in your personal computer, what would you do? Try as you may to stuff it with all the data you want to, it will take you quite a while of reckless stuffing before it runs out of storage. Yes, that does sounds like a dream but with Seagate having unveiled it’s hard drive technology that permits 1 terabyte/inch, such 60 TB hard drives may just be the future!
Seagate has already demoed this cutting-edge technology which enables the company to achieve a storage density of 1 TB per inch. Although this is still very much in its testing and research phases and the mass production can’t be expected for another some years, Seagate expects that in the coming decade, this technology will help the company build 60 TB hard drives. These drives will come in the same size as your average hard drive, as 3.5-inch drives.
Seagate has been able to accomplish this with the help of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). HAMR is a next-generation technology that will replace the currently prevalent Perpendicular Magnetic Recording in the coming days. And with the help of it, Seagate hopes to double the capacity of a drive without changing its size.
For instance, the top capacity of a 3.5-inch hard drive, at 500 GB/inch, is 3 terabytes. With the new HAMR technology, Seagate can use the same size to squeeze in 6TB storage capacity.
With an explosive growth of mobile devices and social media as well as online applications, users will be consuming more and more amounts of data. And such technological advancements on the hard drive front and quite crucial to keep up with this demand. ‘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. 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’ said the senior vice President of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate.
You can read the entire text of the press release from Seagate over here.
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