Seagate details how HAMR will get it to 20TB in 2019, 100TB+ before 2030

Seagate CTO Mark Re wrote a blog post in which he details how Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) will make it possible to create 20TB HDDs in 2019. He says Seagate engineers are currently hard at work to commercialize the technolology. The first HAMR-based disks are expected in late 2018. Looking further into the future, Mark predicts that HAMR in combination with bit patterned media will result in the creation of HDDs with a capacity of over 100TB before 2030.

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.

It sounds almost simple, but the science and engineering expertise required, the research, experimentation, lab development and product development to perfect this technology has been enormous.

You can read the full post from Mark at Backblaze.