PLENTY OF MEMORY AT THIS TIME

Posted on June 15th, 2012 by Bob and Joy Schwabach

Seagate can now put a trillion bits of data on one square inch of a disk drive. They will soon come out with a six terabyte 3.5-inch drive for desktops and a two terabyte 2.5-inch drive for laptops. A 60 terabyte drive is feasible, say the engineers. To put that in perspective, a 60 terabyte drive could hold 216 million pages of text or 18,000 hours of good-quality video.

Seagate claims it is achieving this density through “heat assisted magnetic recording” (HAMR).  HAMR gets around the problem that occurs from packing data too tightly on a magnetic surface. Normally, the data gets corrupted as it magnetizes, but with HAMR, the bits are more resistant.

Filed under: backup, electronics, storage

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2 Responses to “PLENTY OF MEMORY AT THIS TIME”

  1. Jack Sughrue, on August 3rd, 2012 at 1:12 pm Said:

    Dear Joy & Bob,
    I have been a faithful weekly reader of On Computing for years.
    I’ve learned more from you two than any of the hundreds of computing books I own. You two, in short, and not only wonderful but completely accessible. Thank you for all the great columns over all the years.

    Jack Sughrue

  2. Bob and Joy Schwabach, on August 3rd, 2012 at 2:53 pm Said:

    Thank you for the great letter. It made us feel great!

    Bob and Joy Schwabach