Seagate is developing the technology necessary to be able to market, within the next three years, hard drives able to store up to 300 TB of information.
According to "The Inquirer" and "Joystiq", Seagate expects this technology to be commercially viable by 2010. In order to achieve such technology, researchers are currently working on a hard drive which uses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) techniques.
HAMR is a recording technique which magnetically records data in high stability media (for example: steel and silver alloys), by using a laser to heat the surface before the actual recording of the bits.
This technique allows the recording of bits in much smaller areas, avoiding the “superparamagnetic effect” that limits current hard drive technology, with the difficulty of having to heat the surface prior to the actual recording. By using HAMR the company expects to store 50 TB of information on a single square inch of drive space, or around 300 TB on a standard 3.5” drive. With 300 TB of storage space we may never have to worry about filling it up. With that kind of space you could store the entire Library of Congress (without compression), 6,144 50GB Blu-ray discs…or even the entire library of PS to PS3 games that could ever be created, with room to spare.
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Marcelo R. is a Data Recovery engineer at Kepler Data Recovery. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of KDR.
To read more articles from this author or other Data Recovery Engineers please log onto the (blog.keplerlabs.com).
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