Seagate Boosts Storage Capacity with Laser-based Hard Drives

You may take them for granted, but hard drives are inside most of our favorite gadgets, from our MP3 players to our DVRs, which is why we envy the folks at Wired who recently got a tour of Seagate's R&D labs. The company is apparently working on new drives that would rely on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which uses lasers to heat the hard drive platter and thus allow more information to be stored in a given area. This kind of technology could have us looking at 3.5-inch drives with a 37.5TB storage capacity. Seagate is also gunning to give flash memory a run for its money with Probe, a non-volatile magnetic-based media that will come in "tiny form factors." More storage capacity in smaller form factors, we say bring it on. – Louis Ramirez More »