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SSDs might still be the hot topic in storage, but considering the high costs per GB, hard disk drives aren't going anywhere any time soon. Seagate has announced that it has managed to reach storage densities of 1 Terabit per square inch, something the company claims will allow for twice the hard drive capacity of today within the next few years.

SSDs might still be the hot topic in storage, but considering the high costs per GB, hard disk drives aren't going anywhere any time soon. Seagate has announced that it has managed to reach storage densities of 1 Terabit per square inch, something the company claims will allow for twice the hard drive capacity of today within the next few years.

For now the technology is only on a demo stage and it's based on Seagate's HAMR or heat-assisted magnetic recording technology. It allows Seagate to store roughly 2 million linear bits per inch which leads to the 1 Terabit per square inch claim, or as Seagate puts it 55 percent higher than today's 620 Gigabit per square inch density ceiling.

Seagate is expecting that its first generation of HAMR drives will come in capacities of around 6TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2TB for 2.5-inch drives. The company is expecting the HAMR technology to be able to scale to somewhere between 5 to 10 Terabits per inch and as such allowing for 30 to 60TB 3.5-inch drives and 10 to 20TB 2.5-inch drives over a 10 year period from the introduction of the first HAMR drives.

As for now, Seagate hasn't announced a launch date of any HAMR based hard disk drives and it looks like the technology will be a lot more demanding in terms of mechanical design compared to traditional hard disk drives. That said, we have little doubt that Seagate and its competitors will find ways to overcome this within the next few years and we'd dare to guess that at launch we'll see larger capacity drives than Seagate is currently expecting to launch, simply based on the fact that Seagate is talking about 3TB and not 4TB drives in its press release and making comparisons to these, rather than the larger, already available 4TB models.

Keep in mind that we're most likely two to three years away from retail products and hard disk drive densities are likely to increase before then using currently technology, or some interim technology. Once we move beyond HD resolution content and with the ever increasing pixel density of digital cameras and all other kind of content that people store on hard disk drives, something else is going to have to keep the industry moving forward until HAMR arrives.

Source: Seagate