“I'm not dead yet!” may be an appropriately pulled quote in the instance of mechanical hard drives. Despite the SSD revolution ( SSDs explained here ), there's still a place in the world for magnetic storage – and it will likely remain that way for a long, long time; after all, we're still using tape drives in some industry sectors.

The latest R&D by storage luminaries introduces a roadmap to 100TB storage by 2025, aided by increases in density. Under the present manufacturing technology, hard drive platter density sits at 1Tb/in^2 (that's a terabit, not byte – so 1/8 of a TB per inch, squared). This allows 4TB consumer drives at relatively affordable prices and 8TB enterprise solutions.

The Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC) recently disclosed its technology roadmap, found above. The roadmap suggests that increased density will couple with shingled magnetic recording (already available in enterprise solutions) and two-dimensional recording, two methodologies for which data is recorded to the disk.

Once HAMR is introduced – heat-assisted magnetic recording – we can expect to see density increase to 10Tb/in^2. 10Tb equates 1.25 Terabytes, so assuming platter size and count remain the same – that'd be four disks in a 3.5” HDD – we can anticipate 64-100TB of storage by the end of this roadmap, or 2025.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.