A very interesting roadmap has surfaced. You guys know, we recently tested the really nice Seagate Barracuda Pro 14TB HDD (review), 14TB huge right? Well, a roadmap from Seagate has surfaced showing their plans and intentions as they are working on 48TB and if you follow that trendline on the roadmap, 100 TB HDDs in 2025.

For that to be able to work Seagate will apply heat-assisted magnetic recording which is also referred to was HAMR, a technology that has around since the late 1990s. HAMR is a way of shrinking a disk drive's magnetized bits beyond the limits of current PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) tech, in which progressively smaller bits become unstable with error-prone bit values. HAMR is a technology that over time will enable a big increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a disk. A small laser is attached to a recording head, designed to heat a tiny spot on the disk where the data will be written. This allows a smaller bit cell to be written as either a 0 or a 1. The smaller bit cell size enables more bits to be crammed into a given surface area — increasing the areal density of data, and increasing drive capacity.

Seagate wants to sample the first hamr samples to its partners before the end of 2018. Seagate foresees that within five years it reach capacities of the 50 terabytes. By further developing hamm to hdmr ( heated dot magnetic recording ) something 100 TB is in reach. Meanwhile Western Digital ops an alternative energy-assisted recording tech. MAMR, or Microwave-assisted magnetic recording. WD expects its first commercial MAMR drives to be released sometime in 2019.

Screenshot: hexus.net

New Storage Roadmap shows 100TB HDDs in 2025