Hard Drives Exceeding 60TB with HAMR Technology

In March 2012, Seagate was the first manufacturer to successfully store more than 1Tb per square inch using HAMR technology.

Scaled to a 3.5'' hard drive, this represents more than 60TB of data, while current high-capacity hard drives can "only" store 4TB of data.

The technology used is HAMR (Heat-assisted magnetic recording). In fact, the data is written using a laser that "burns" a very stable medium. It leverages the advantages of iron and platinum alloy particles.

This technology could arrive on the market fairly quickly. Seagate anticipates 20TB hard drives well before 2020, meaning in just a few years.

The technology is promising because the current storage density (based on PMR Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) will be such in a few years that the bits will be so small that they will become magnetically unstable due to a phenomenon called superparamagnetism.