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...

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

And won't support cross-drive OS installations.

I just hope that they don't have to design a "tera-read" function to read data off of the terabyte drives. That will make all of our computers wayyyy dumber.

Perhaps microdrives would become the standard size drive using this technology, providing they can have high rotational speeds.

How come nobody makes 5.25-inch drives any more?

Researchers at Yellowstone are looking for ways that extremophile organisms which live in hot pools of sulfuric acid could be used. One of those ways might be memory storage. You get these nanometer-sized tough little shells which you could put metal into, and voila, maybe two or three orders of magnitude increase in memory density. Sorry, I have no link.

Speaking of topic drift, what will become of our society when inter-active holographic touch sensory feedback AIs can run on your glasses and inside your underwear? Will Darwin's Law take effect?