According to the manufacturer Seagate, hard drives with the heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) process are already in development and a few consumers have already been able to obtain the 20 TB drives. A 30 TB version is being prepared and they expect to have hard drives of 50 TB, 75 TB and up to 100 TB by the year 2030.
Although there is no official release date for Seagate's first 30TB HARM hard drives, they are expected to arrive in 2023 or 2024. The 50TB drives are expected as early as 2026.
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Large amount of hard drive storage despite the presence of SSDs
The Seagate researchers succeeded in increasing the achievable data density tenfold with the help of graphene. Hard drives use a carbon-based coating to protect the platter from read and write heads and other factors. To increase storage capacity, manufacturers reduced the space between the head and platters.
Today they are about 3 nanometers thick, which has increased the density to about 1 TB per square inch. The researchers replaced a coating with a graphene variant, which contains one to four layers of material. After measuring corrosion, thermal stability, surface smoothness, and lubricant handling, they concluded that graphene can reduce friction by a factor of two, causing much less corrosion. HARM technology heats platinum iron alloy plates to elevated temperatures that normal coatings cannot withstand. Graphene in combination with HARM should be able to generate a data density of about 10 TB per square inch.
Despite the fact that the vast majority of consumers now use solid state drives As primary storage, the “old-fashioned” hard drive is still in development and is used for mass data storage. The use of graphene and HARM technology has the potential to improve data density by a factor of a hundred. This is particularly attractive to consumers who want a lot of storage, such as those who use data storage servers or have large projects. HDDs are still much cheaper per gigabyte than SSDs and it looks like thanks to HARM and graphene technologies, they are going to stay that way for years to come.
Source: Guru3D
