Seagate Reaches Terabit Areal Density Milestone
This new areal density milestone could pave the way to 3.5-inch drives with 60 TB capacities.
Seagate said on Monday that it has become the first HDD manufacturer to achieve the milestone storage density of 1 terabit per square inch. It was accomplished by using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) instead of the traditional Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) method. This achievement is expected to pave the way to 3.5-inch HDDs with 60 TB capacities possibly just over a decade away... if we're even using hard drives by then, that is.
"Hard drive manufacturers increase areal density and capacity by shrinking a platter’s data bits to pack more within each square inch of disk space," the company explains. "They also tighten the data tracks, the concentric circles on the disk’s surface that anchor the bits. The key to areal density gains is to do both without disruptions to the bits’ magnetization, a phenomenon that can garble data."
Yet by using HAMR technology, Seagate said that it has achieved a linear bit density of about 2 million bits per inch, resulting in a data density of just over 1 trillion bits, or 1 terabit, per square inch -- 55-percent higher than today’s areal density ceiling of 620 gigabits per square inch.
Seagate said that the first generation of HAMR drives, at just over 1 terabit per square inch, will likely more than double the capacities of the largest 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch hard drives on the market today, resulting in 6 TB and 2 TB drives respectively at the very least. With a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per square inch, capacities will likely reach to 30 TB to 60 TB for 3.5-inch drives and 10 TB to 20 TB for 2.5-inch drives.
"The growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity," said Mark Re, senior vice president of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate. "Hard disk drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content."
Seagate achieved the 1 terabit per square inch breakthroughs in materials science and near-field optics at its heads and media research and development centers in Bloomington, Minnesota, and Fremont, California.

You do realize that people will just RAID the large drives as well right? Thus being able to have the same level of fault tolerance you're talking about, but with more space. The only downside in having large drives in a RAID situation where you have fault tolerance (something other than RAID 0), it will just take longer to rebuild the fault tolerance when a drive dies.
Likewise, as drive size goes up, cost per G(T)/B goes down. Just take a quick look at NewEgg some time and note the price difference between a 500 GB drive, a 1 TB drive, and a 2 TB drive. The price per GB is lower on the 2 TB than the other two and the price per GB on the 1 TB is lower still than the 500 GB drive.
Porn; movies; all the same. No plot and bad acting.
is there a difference between the two?
lets see here, i have a 1.5tb drive, if you expanded it to 60tb, the read/write would be in the 5gb range, thats if the read write scales with dencity (it somewhat does)
ssd have a harder to over come physical wall than hdds, and they will always be more expensive, while newer hdds are comeing with so much space, for a normal person its possible that they never use up all the space on them... if the drives got faster and tried to make everything a sequential read, its possible to match ssds in read speed.
I just looked it up, for uncompressed 4k video at 8bit color depth and 30fps you are looking at 2.69TB per hour and 44GB per minute, although I have no idea what/if 3D adds anything to it.
That being said Sony needs to say screw the 100GB Blu-ray tech and start looking more toward 10TB lol.
Thanks for informing me
now this is another point to make, some times compression can look immaculate. there is an archer season 1 and 2 rip floating around that is 100mb an episode at 720p... and it was better looking than my previous sd at 400mb encode.
think if it, thats a 720p 21~ minute show, and its compressed to 100mb an episode... correct that, 91mb an episode.
the point im making is that compression isn't an evil in and of itself, most people wont notice the difference between a well compressed video, and an uncompressed video.
same here, holding off on 4tb drive till prices are at 200$
Oh there's a plot...what goes in, must come out.
Or just buy 2 of these large drives, 1 for backup. Problem solved.