Thread: 10TB hard drives as possible when Hitachi heat storage media

The storage capacity of today's hard drives may nevertheless be seen as quite generous. But as we have learned through time, you can most likely never get too much storage space and modern 2TB hard drives will soon be replaced by more spacious models. But even if we made this year will see 2.5TB hard drives and maybe even 3TB models in 3.5-inch format, the Hitachi bigger plans for the future, or how about the mechanical hard drives with 10TB of storage capacity.

In any case, what will be possible with Hitachi further development of the well-liked vertical magnetic recording technology, which makes use of a very small, around 20nm, but powerful beam of light to heat the storage medium while a magnetic write head writes data bits.

The system is called thermally-assisted recording plus will offer a storage density of the complete 2.5 terabits for each square inch, in other words, more than five times the storage density of today's densest hard drives.

Unfortunately there is no concrete information about when the technology might find its way into products in the consumer market. But even if the technology is now said to be costly in any case have to find a replacement for perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which is said to be difficult to offer higher storage density than 1 terabit per square inch.