Samsung has eventually found a way to create platters for hard drives that can hold 1TB of data, paving the way for 4TB hard drives in the near future.
At CeBIT last week, Samsung unveiled that it had the technology required in order to relese a 4TB HDD.
Currently, HDD maker are producing 3.5-inches 3TB drives equipped with 750 GB platters.
Hitachi has been also experimenting with the areal storage density for HDD. Last year, the company and other Japanese researchers (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, National University Corporation Tokyo Institute of Technology, Kyoto University) developed an ultra-high density paterning technology based on a self-arranged phenomenon of polymer materials. The materials allowed for the formation of accurate magnetic strustures sized just 10nm.
The technology, when applied to current density HDD (with areal density of about 500Gbits / square inch), would result to an 8-fold increase in the recording density. This means that we could see HDD with capacities of 24TB in the future.