Seagate, our friendly neighborhood storage manufacturer has plans to produce 37 Terabyte drives - blowing the socks off of anything currently on the market. Wired reports that the drives are still a few years off, but the firm has successfully tested platters that provide 421GB per square inch.
The technology is not without it's flaws - it requires Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), which though useful flies directly contrary to the high performance needs of mega-nerds like myself. We typically want to cool down our PCs to allow for peak performance. This solution literally means placing at least one and more likely multiple heat elements within the CPU chassis.
The other problem with this technology is that it will require investment in a more expensive platter because the current platters won't support such small writes with stability.
It certainly has a market in the server side arena - especially for companies with large public storage demands - and it could mean a new market for startup image hosting and video hosting services where the expense of the hardware required for such a setup would be dramatically reduced. It also would provide a wide open possibility for more players within the edge cacheing industry, providing competition for the likes of Akamai, and would effectively minimize market spaces dominated by Google and Amazon because of their infrastructure.
Of course, if you listen to Seagate CEO, they aren't changing the world - they are just helping "people buy more crap and watch porn."
In related news, Hitachi Announced a 1 Terabyte Drive to be released soon, but 1 terabyte is hardly news. I've already got an external terabyte array sitting on my desktop.
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