Hard Drive storage capacity has increased rapidly and now it is expected to be doubled in the upcoming 2 years with the advent of new thermal-assisted magnetic writing technology .
Currently hard drives use Perpendicular Magnetic Recording ( PMR ) which was first introduced in 2005 . PMR allowed much larger storage capacity , almost double of the originally used longitudinal recording method in spinning hard drives. The PMR method currently provides about 630 Gigabits per square inch and is expected to reach its limit of 1Tera bit per square inch in the next few years .
The new recording technology called Heat-assisted magnetic recording ( HAMR ) is in development which uses laser to pre-heat the material and then data is written magnetically .
This year , Seagate announced that it achieved 1Tb per square inch capacity using HAMR technology and said that first HAMR drives will easily double this capacity and we can expect 6TB capability from its first gen 3.5 inch drives .
Now , TDK corporation has announced that its developing HAMR magnetic heads and it has achieved 1.5 Terabits per square inch capacity . TDK claims that it will be possible to produce 3.5 inch desktop hard drives with 8 to 10 TB capacity and 2.5 inch drives with 2TB capacity with HAMR technology .
So , we can expect 6-10 TB hard drives in by 2014 once the companies start releasing drives using HAMR technology . However , there is no word yet on the cost of the drives which might increase due to the addition of laser . The power consumption of these drives may also be higher than the current drives .
Currently hard drives use Perpendicular Magnetic Recording ( PMR ) which was first introduced in 2005 . PMR allowed much larger storage capacity , almost double of the originally used longitudinal recording method in spinning hard drives. The PMR method currently provides about 630 Gigabits per square inch and is expected to reach its limit of 1Tera bit per square inch in the next few years .
The new recording technology called Heat-assisted magnetic recording ( HAMR ) is in development which uses laser to pre-heat the material and then data is written magnetically .
This year , Seagate announced that it achieved 1Tb per square inch capacity using HAMR technology and said that first HAMR drives will easily double this capacity and we can expect 6TB capability from its first gen 3.5 inch drives .
Now , TDK corporation has announced that its developing HAMR magnetic heads and it has achieved 1.5 Terabits per square inch capacity . TDK claims that it will be possible to produce 3.5 inch desktop hard drives with 8 to 10 TB capacity and 2.5 inch drives with 2TB capacity with HAMR technology .
So , we can expect 6-10 TB hard drives in by 2014 once the companies start releasing drives using HAMR technology . However , there is no word yet on the cost of the drives which might increase due to the addition of laser . The power consumption of these drives may also be higher than the current drives .