This technology paves the way for 100 TB hard drives

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• This technology paves the way for 100 TB hard drives

Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) is literally one of the hottest developments in the storage industry. HAMR technology dramatically improves the amount of data that can be stored on a magnetic device like hard drives. It works by temporarily heating the disk material during the writing process, allowing much more data to be written to the same area. While standard disks based on conventional magnetic recording methods have a recording density of approximately 1,14 Tb/in2, HAMR-based media can achieve a recording density of 5-6 TB/in2. To put that in perspective, the standard 3,5-inch hard drive created with HAMR could store between 70 and 80TB of data, which is up to four times the size of today's largest hard drive. Seagate 20TB Exos.

Push the envelope

Now, even before this hard drive (built with HAMR) goes on sale in December 2020, a team of three researchers from Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan have created a new approach to integrate even more data. The team of Simon John Greaves, Hikaru Yamane and Yoichiro Tanaka used some binary pattern media (BPM) points with two magnetic structures to store two bits of information at each point. By storing both bits while writing at high and low temperatures, the researchers were able to achieve a storage density of more than 7 TB/in². Thanks to his research, 100TB drives are no longer a pipe dream and closer to reality than ever.