Heat-assistedMagneticRecording

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  • Seagate hits one terabit per square inch, compares self favorably to the Milky Way

    by 
    Brian Heater
    Brian Heater
    03.19.2012

    You know that big new hard drive you just picked up? Get ready to feel bad. Seagate today is talking up the fact that it has managed to cram one terabit (that's one trillion bits, for the record) into a square inch. That super-dense storage comes thanks to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, a successor to the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) being utilized in current hard drives. The manufacturer sees the technology hitting the market later this decade, "doubl[ing] the storage capacity of today's hard drives" in its wake. Just how many bits are we talking about here? Let Seagate put things into astronomical perspective: "The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion." More info can be found in the press release after the break.