In theory, HAMR should allow for areal densities up to 10 terabits per square inch (magnetic bits just 1nm long!), and thus desktop hard drives in the 60TB range. Meanwhile, conventional perpendicular recording is expected to hit one terabit in the next few years, but the roadmap to greater densities isn’t very clear. There is no word on the cost of HAMR drives, or whether the addition of a laser will significantly impact power consumption or I/O performance.
The biggest winner from larger hard drives, of course, is cloud storage and computing — but then again, the other angle is that you’ll have so much local storage that the cloud seems a bit pointless, especially when we all have 100Mbps internet connections. But then again, with the unstoppable surge of smartphones and tablets and flash memory, do mechanical hard drives really have a future in consumer electronics?
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/12 ... -drives-on-their-way
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