Hard drives will use microwaves and lasers to store 60TB or more | Upscaled

With 16TB and 18TB drives, we're nearly hit the limits of how much data we can cram onto a hard drive platter. But a pair of new methods for writing data may enable a leap forward in capacity: heat-assisted and microwave-assisted magnetic recording, HAMR and MAMR  (collectively called energy-assisted, or EAMR). Hard drives may feel old fashioned compared to flash SSDs, but these new methods use some cutting edge physics to cram as much as 60TB of data into a hard drive.

All three of the big hard drive makers, Western Digital, Toshiba, and Seagate, are developing versions of this technology, and the first consumer drives just shipped.

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