TDK Doubles HDD Capacities by Year's End, Uses Laser Beams

It is more or less true that one can get away with many things if they shout the right reason (as long as no one is hurt anyway), and there is little doubt that 'double HDD capacity' will work just fine for TDK's latest pet project involving lasers.

Laser-based technologies are getting steadily more popular with each passing month (this goes for peripherals, storage and other things).

TDK appears determined to use laser beams in its latest effort to make hard drive units better than ever.

HDDs may have lost some ground to the faster and more energy-efficient SSDs, but their high capacities have staved off the worst of the onslaught up to now.

Now, it is this same aspect of platter-spinners that is about to improve, to double in fact, if TDK gets what it wants from the newest laser project.

Basically, the company says it can make hard drive capacity grow twofold with the use of laser beams.

At the moment, the technology that reads and writes data to and from the platters of an HDD relies on a magnetic head.

Said head needs to be as close to the surface of the platter as it can without actually making contact and, while impressive, this is still a limited approach.

The problem arises when platters can't hold proper magnetic charges beyond a certain, as yet not clearly defined capacity limit.

TDK wants to remove this problem altogether by using lasers, along with a material that is stable at normal temperatures but must be heated when writing data on it.

Heat-assisted magnetic recording is what the procedure is called, or HAMR for short, and is supposedly able to make 2.5-inch HDDs with platters of 1 TB each. This means 3.5-inch drives can have 4 TB platters, leading to 8-16 TB total capacities.

No doubt people would expect to learn that it will take a while for the project to bear fruit, but TDK actually expects the first drives to ship before the ongoing year is out (2011).