Storage has one rather annoying feature – it is never enough. That’s why the quest for more and more spacious hard drives and SSDs keeps on going but there might be some good news on the horizon – expect 100 TB hard drives by 2025.
The news comes out of members of the Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC) so it has a great degree of reliability. The key to more and more capacity lies in the usage of more and more advanced technologies. According to ASTC the current perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology will be replaced by improved PMR technology known as PRM+ in the 2015-2017 timeframe. There will also be a significant boost in capacity after 2017 when heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) enters the production process. Around 2021 HAMR will be replaced by bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR), which will be then retired in favor of heated-dot magnetic recording (HDMR) in the 2023-2025 time period. The usage of all new technologies will lead to about 30 per cent larger capacities each year in the 2017-2025 time period.
Well, looks like hard drives are here to stay and maybe, maybe, soon we will have more than enough capacity to use. We’ll see.
Source: Forbes.com