Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives on their way

Alternatively pass on that hysterical title and go directly to the press release <a href="http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&#38;name=terabit-milestone-storage-seagate-pr&#38;vgnextoid=295d922d58716310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD" rel="nofollow">http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&#38;name=...</a><p>Main content is: <i>The maximum capacity of today’s 3.5-inch hard drives is 3 terabytes (TB), at about 620 gigabits per square inch, while 2.5-inch drives top out at 750 gigabytes (GB), or roughly 500 gigabits per square inch. The first generation of HAMR drives, at just over 1 terabit per square inch, will likely more than double these capacities – to 6TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2TB for 2.5-inch models. The technology offers a scale of capacity growth never before possible, with a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per square inch – 30TB to 60TB for 3.5-inch drives and 10TB to 20TB for 2.5-inch drives.</i>

Since it requires a pulse from the laser to write does this also mean data will be more durable and less vulnerable to damage from external electromagnetic fields?

I really look forward to the day, when, as a general consumer and user of computers, I can just completely ignore hard drive capacity (cause it's just always bigger than I need). Even though it won't be, I will just perceive it as limitless. I'm almost there, but not quite. It's amazing how much useless busy work limited hard drive capacity generates on an individual and organizational level. Can't wait to be free of that.

Sounds more more suited for write-rarely, read-often data.<p>Not sure I would trust the wear and tear of an alloy that is constantly heated and cooled.<p>60TB of write-rarely cheap storage for backups would be very handy though.

And this was just a few years back...<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8</a> (Get perpendicular! animation by Hitachi)

In the PC consumer's choice between SSD and traditional HD, I suspect that the decreasing marginal returns from this increase in storage space, will not outweigh the benefits of SSDs. However, in the server market this increase will continue to favor traditional HDs.

I'm interested in learning what this will do for I/O speeds, anyone got good pointers?

Seems quite similar to the classic magneto-optical (MO) disk drive technology that was (at least briefly) popular:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive</a><p>The MO drives use a laser to heat the recording substrate to the Curie temperature during the recording path, too.

That's a lot of data to lose on one drive

I can see the first 50% of the reviews having a prodigious failure rate.

This technology "Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording" (HAMR) is expected to be supplanted by a new technology to put even more bits into a hard drive "Krypton-Yittrium Joined-Electron Laser Light Injection" (K-Y JELLI).<p>(Ok, sorry, couldn't resist)

I can't imagine a heating element would be helpful to write times.

I am going to download <i>so many linux isos</i> with this.

So I can either trust my data to a big stack of transistors and hope they don't just randomly die, or to a pile of spinning rusty metal discs and hope that a motor doesn't fail or something scrapes the rust off the platters. :)