As SSDs have gotten ever cheaper, the appeal of traditional magnetic hard drives has waned. Well, for gamers if not some industrial scale storage applications. That's remained true even with flash memory prices on the up of late. But if you want maximum capacity, there's still no substitute for a spinning platter. Which is why Seagate has been demoing new hard drive tech that's expected to extend capacities to as much as 240TB per drive in the next 10 years or so.
The latest heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) in cutting-edge drives offers as much as double the data density of the more traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) tech found in hard drives. But now a research team from Seagate Technology, NIMS, and Tohoku University has successfully demo'ed multi-level HAMR (via Tom's Hardware), thereby unlocking even further data density.
