NEW YORK, USA: With new technologies coming into the hard disk drive space, the current perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR) will make way for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, believes hard disk manufacturer Seagate.

Seagate SVP Mark Re told ConceivablyTech (blog) that Seagate believes that there will be just a few more PMR product generations and a new technology will be necessary within three to five as PMR may reach its end just north of 1 Tb/inch2.

Next-Gen HDD Tech To Enable 200-300 TB Storage Space

1 Tb/inch2 capacity seems to be within reach very soon. Seagate’s highest density drive (a 750 GB Momentus notebook drive) is currently at 541 Gb/inch2. Moreover, only recently did Samsung announce a drive that exceeds a density of over 700 Gb/inch2.

"At that time, the industry will have a choice to embrace patterned media or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to increase the storage density of hard drives."

While PMR may hit just about an aereal storage of 1 Tb/inch2, heat assisted technology will enable 50 Tb/inch2 of storage space, the blog adds.

Thus, Seagate favours heat assisted recording, a association that dates back 1998 when Seagate acquired Quinta, patterned media and believes that HAMR will push HDD storage densities into the double digits of terabits.

"While no one can predict the actual capacity of the general hard drive at that time, it seems to be safe to assume that we will be seeing hundreds of terabytes of space on single 3.5” drives," he added.