15TB Hard Drives Could Be a Reality in 2015

Hard drive capacities continue to grow, but it’s a constant battle for the hardware developers to pack higher density drives into the same form factor. There are of course many new technologies on the horizon that promise improved storage capabilities, but the latest demonstration from TDK at the Ceatek trade-show in Japan stands out from the crowd.

TDK demonstrated heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, which looks set to promise massively improved storage capacities as early as next year. The new technology magnetically records data onto the drive using laser thermal assistance, this heats the drive platter material to reduce the size of the “pitches” on the platter where the head reads and writes data; this allows the drives to store increased amounts of data compared to current hard drives.

I don’t confess to fully understanding the technology, but if they want to put lasers in hard drives to help increase their storage capability by heating them up, then I’m happy for them to do so.

HAMR development has been a big focus for TDK, as well as Seagate and Western Digital, but it wasn’t expect to be ready until around 2017. These recent demonstrations are a big leap for the new technology, which TDK say could be ready in 2015 or early 2016 with capacities of around 15TB.

I dread to think of the price a drive like this could command in a market that’s currently spending a small fortune on 6TB drives, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction to feed our ever growing demand for storage.

Thank you KitGuru for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of HotHardware.