14 DAY TRIAL // At the moment, hard disk drives have, at most, a capacity of 4 TB, and that's usually when four platters are used in a 3.5-inch form factor.
TDK has managed to exceed that limit by inventing a new magnetic head that uses thermal assist recording and a near-light field.
The result was a data density of 1.5Tbits per square inch, 50% higher than on its other HDDs.
Thus, when making 2.5-inch drives for notebooks (and ultrabooks if the thickness is 7mm), it can enable 1 TB of storage per platter.
Meanwhile, 3.5-inch HDDs can have 2 TB per platter, leading to 3-platter units of 6 TB.
Unfortunately, even though TDK is ready to demo storage units of this sort, commercial availability won't come until 2014, by which time it may be too late. Seagate definitely won't leave its own HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology in the dust until then, not when it can (theoretically) create 60 TB drives.