14 DAY TRIAL // I've said a lot about flash based devices in the last weeks and about how the SSDs will take over the storage market and will finally push the magnetic based devices over the edge. But it seems that the hard drive as we know it could live a while longer. Because Seagate just announced a technology that could offer about 500 times more storage space on the same surface.
Seagate is currently working on a technology that should drastically increase storage capacity of our hard drives. Using a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), the company says that they will offer something like 50 TB of information into a single square inch of drive space. If you keep the analogy in mind, you will see that about 300 TB of information will fit on a standard 3.5" drive.
The technology will be available no sooner than 2010, but at that moment it could come in handy when implemented onto the future Xbox or PS consoles. The future gaming rigs could depend only on hard drive games and there will be no need for optical storage if such a hard drive will come to life. Just to tease you let me say that in 300TB of space you could cram around 6,144 50 GB Blu-ray disks.
Seagate is also developing a non-volatile magnetic-based media that will come in "tiny form factors." While that sounds great, I don't think that a magnetic device could ever get smaller and more cost effective than a flash based one. We'll just have to wait and see what happens when the HAMR hard drives appear.