Seagate has demonstrated hard drive technology that squeezes a trillion bits into a single square inch, claiming it's the first hard drive manufacturer to do so.

Over the next 10 years, the company says, this will lead to standard 3.5-inch drives that can store 60 terabytes of information. Today's 3.5-inch drives give you three terabytes of storage, stuffing about 620 billion bits into each square inch.

"This is really a nice bird-in-hand type of vision of the future," Seagate senior vice president Mark Re tells Wired.

With the world uploading massive amounts of digital data into the proverbial cloud, more storage is always needed. Facebook tells us it's now storing more than 100 petabytes of photos and videos alone. Many storage outfits are turning away from traditional hard drives towards much faster solid state drives – which have no moving parts – but Re says Seagate is still fully committed to good old fashioned spinning hard drives.

To fit a terabit of data in a single square inch, Seagate used heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, where extremely precise lasers burn data into an iron alloy substrate. HAMR has been around for about six years, but it's still in the early stages. Today's commercial hard drives are typically encoded using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), but PMR has it's limitations. As pieces of data are nestled closer and closer together on a hard drive platter – to increase density – their magnetic properties start to interfere with each other.

With HAMR, the laser raises the temperature of the disk to about 650 degrees Kelvin in less than a nanosecond. This high temperature reduces the magnetic interference, letting the hard drive's write head encode data in a tighter spots than it would at lower temperatures.

Re says he sees this demonstration as more of an evolution than a revolution. There was no eureka moment. Rather, his group repeatedly tinkered with the substrate, the optics on the recording head, and the thermal controls until they're honed the system to its current state. At this point, Re believes Seagate will release commercially drives based on the technology within the decade.

And eventually, the company says, the same technology will deliver storage densities of 5 to 10 terabits per square inch, something previously believed to be impossible.