As SSDs become increasingly affordable, interest in traditional magnetic hard drives has declined, particularly among gamers, although some specific sectors, especially industrial-scale storage applications, still require this outdated technology.

This trend persists even with recent increases in flash memory prices. However, if you seek maximum capacity, there is still no substitute for a hard drive. This is why Seagate has introduced new hard drive technology that is expected to increase capacity to 240TB per drive in the next 10 years or more.

The latest technology, known as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), in these hard drives offers up to twice the data density of the traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology commonly found in hard drives.

However, a research team from Seagate Technology, NIMS, and Tohoku University has successfully demonstrated multi-level HAMR, unlocking even greater data density.

Best Potential for Hard Drive

Interestingly, the basic concept of multi-level magnetic recording is not new. The challenge has been for technology companies to find suitable materials. Now, the team led by Seagate has found it, namely two FePt-C nanogranular films separated by a Ru-C spacer layer with a cubic crystal structure.

By adjusting laser power and magnetic fields during data writing, the FePT layers can be accessed independently, doubling the capacity. If that’s not impressive enough, researchers believe this approach can be applied to three-level recording and may even succeed at four levels.

If so, you would get a hard drive with 10 platters and a rough capacity of about 240TB, which should almost cover the installation of one or two of the latest data-heavy games on Steam.

For comparison, Seagate’s current BarraCuda desktop drive series has a maximum capacity of 8TB, while its enterprise-class HDDs reach 24TB. So there’s the potential for a tenfold increase in capacity compared to Seagate’s current largest offerings.

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With such capacity, you no longer need to worry about storing extremely large amounts of data in the future.