Seagate says: 300TB drives by the year 2010

Author: Wil Harris
Published: 3rd January 2007

Could we soon see 300TB drives from Seagate?

Seagate has said that a new technology called Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording could mean we see 300 Terabyte drives by 2010.

Joystiq says that the technology would mean you could store 6,144 Blu-ray discs - quite enough to allow the PS3 to act as a home entertainment center with nary a disc in sight.

Seagate reckons that it can get 50GB of data in a square inch of physical space. That's some pretty stunning data density, and is sure to be something of a calamity should the drive get a bad sector.

As a Seagate tech explains, HAMR:

"Uses lasers to momentarily heat the disk surface and allow the drive heads to write information. When the surface of the drive cools, the bits settle into a more stable state for longer-term reliability. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum."

There are surely going to be implications for reliability - many users prefer to buy drives with lower capacity, and hence lower data density, to increase the reliability of the drive.

Do you look forward to the days of multi-terabyte drives, or are you struggling to fill 160GB even now? Let us know your thoughts over in the forums.