Hard drives with a capacity of 100 TB promise to release by 2025

A consortium of companies engaged in the development and production of IDEMA disk drives announced a drive development plan for the next 10 years. Using new technologies, it is planned to reach the level of 100 Terabytes by 2025 - this is 10 times more than the largest modern hard drives. From the current PMR technology (perpendicular magnetic recording) it is planned to move to more advanced: HAMR (thermoassisted magnetic recording), BPMR (structured data carriers) and HDMR (magnetic recording with spot heating).

In today's disk drives, there is not a wave of new technologies, and it seems that the limit on the amount of stored information using standard technologies has been reached. In September 2014, the first discs with overlapping track technology (SMR) were released, but they do not allow to significantly increase the recording density. If the recording cells are located too tightly, due to superparamagnetism, an arbitrary change in their contents may occur.

Seagate believes that by 2020, it will be able to submit a 30 TB disk using HAMR technology. This is a system that combines magnetic reading and magneto-optical recording. The laser locally heats the plate surface area, which reduces the tendency to demagnetize the surface material, allows to significantly reduce the size of the magnetic region that stores one bit of information, and increase the stability of data storage, avoiding the harmful effects of superparamagnetism.
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Another technology that offers a solution to the problem of reducing the size of the storage area is BPMR. Instead of the current method of storing the record on 20-30 magnetic domains, it is possible to use one structured area on the plate, since “Magnetic islands”, where each island will store one bit of information - such technology will become possible with the development of nanolithography.

The combination of these two technologies will lead in the not-so-distant future to HDMR technology, which will allow to achieve unprecedented recording densities, in theory, up to 10 Terabits per square inch.