Seagate hits one terabit per square inch; more bits than the Milky Way has stars

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Seagate hits one terabit per square inch, compares self favorably to the Milky Way
By Brian Heater  posted Mar 19th 2012 at 6:43PM



Seagate today is talking up the fact that it has managed to cram one terabit (that's one trillion bits, for the record) into a square inch.

That super-dense storage comes thanks to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, a successor to the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) being utilized in current hard drives. The manufacturer sees the technology hitting the market later this decade, "doubl[ing] the storage capacity of today's hard drives" in its wake.

Just how many bits are we talking about here? Let Seagate put things into astronomical perspective:

"The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion."

http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/19/seagate-hits-one-terabit-per-square-inch-compares-self-favorabl/

HAMR technology eh? Did PwrHamr know about this?