Hot data boosts disk capacities

Drive maker Seagate has demonstrated technology that it believes could pack up to fifty times more data onto hard disks.

The technique, called heat-assisted magnetic recording, could help hard drives fight off the challenge of increasingly capacious and affordable solid-state storage.

It involves using recording heads that heat each magnetic bit of data when it is written, allowing it to cool to a more stable state. Ultra-dense data written using current techniques is vulnerable to temperature fluctuations, according to a report in MIT Technology Review.

Seagate researchers used a laser focused to a dot less than 100 nanometres in diameter with a device called an optical antenna, they report in the journal Nature Photonics.

They achieved data densities of 'only' 250Gbits per square inch, which can be created using conventional techniques. But these are expected to reach their physical limits within five years.