Less than four years away?

According to Joystick, Seagate boffins are apparently working on a hard-drive which uses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) techniques.

The boffins think that this will mean that they can shove 50TB of data into a single square inch of drive space, or around 300TB of information on a standard 3.5-inch drive.

This means that you can stuff the entire Library of Congress onto your hard-drive without any compression.

Man, that will hold a lot of 3D holographic pr0n…

Of course, by then Vista 2010 will require 250 TB for a standard install…