60TB Hard Drives Arriving in 2028, According To Industry Roadmap

An anonymous reader shares a report: The arrival of energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies like Seagate's HAMR will play a crucial role in accelerating HDD capacity growth in the coming years. According to the new IEEE International Roadmap for Devices and Systems Mass Data Storage, we will see 60 TB hard disk drives in 2028. If the prediction is accurate, we will see HDD storage capacity doubling in just four years, something that did not happen for a while. Also, IEEE believes that HDD unit sales will increase.

IEEE's latest HDD development roadmap spans 2022 to 2037 and covers 15 years of hard drive evolution. The arrival of HAMR in 2024 will play a pivotal role in the increase in HDD capacity (even though Western Digital has managed to stay competitive with Seagate's HAMR HDDs using a set of its technologies) over the next few years. IEEE engineers expect HDDs to leapfrog to 40TB in 2025 and 60TB in 2028, doubling capacity from 30TB in 2024. By 2037, there will be 100TB of storage space, according to IEEE.

To get to those extreme capacities, HDD makers will have to increase the areal density of their platters steadily. To get to 40TB per drive, they will have to get to 2 TB/inch^2 in 2025 and then to over 4 TB/inch^2 in 2028 to build 60TB HDDs. By 2037, areal density will grow to over 10 Tb/inch^2. Increasing areal density will necessitate the use of new media, magnetic films, and all-new write and read heads.

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