Seagate is working on creating 20 TB hard drives

Hard disk production has always been one of the critical sectors of the industry; in general, everyone understands why. As soon as an accident happened somewhere in a factory for the production of hard drives, or, moreover, a group of factories stopped working (due to flooding), the cost of laptops, ultrabooks, external hard drives increased rapidly. It goes without saying that nowadays more and more fast and more voluminous hard drives are required. Despite the fact that practically reached the technological limit in this area, manufacturers do not give up. For example, Seagate is currently working on 20 TB hard drives, which are scheduled to begin production by 2020.

New hard drives will work with HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology. The technology is not new, in the same Seagate a special department has been developing in this direction since 1998 . But the company seems to have begun to make some progress, since the technology was demonstrated at CEATEC 2013 in Tokyo.
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Here data is recorded with the participation of a heating laser. According to the developers, the laser heats the surface of the hard drive, which allows you to write data more closely, so to speak. As a result, with the same size of the carrier, you can get more storage space available for data.

The technological limit for modern hard drives, as mentioned above, has been reached. Theoretically, without heating and other tricks, the data can be recorded with a density of 1 Tbit per square inch. Almost reached the density of 750 Gbit per square inch. If the cell size is reduced further, then an arbitrary polarity change will occur, which will make it impossible to continue working with such a carrier.

When the surface is heated by a laser, the developers claim, the data recording density can be increased, without threatening to get an arbitrary change in the polarity of the cells. In Tokyo, a test hard drive made using this technology was demonstrated. The company hopes to adjust the release of HAMR-disks by 2016, gradually increasing the density of data recording. And by 2020, perhaps we will see 20 terabyte hard drives.

Via seagate