It only seems a few years ago that the sweet spot for HDD's was around 100 gig - a dollar per gig !

Now we are hitting the sweet spot of 1TB, at 10c per gig.

Are we going to see 1c per gig within a similar time-frame ?   10TB in 5 years time ? 100TB in 10 years ?

AFAIR, the big jump from 100gig to 1TB was primarily due to vertical encoding of the magnetic grains, and improvements in manufacturing processes.

Short of multiple platters, are there any commercialised advances coming down the pipeline ? Nanotech ?


One I have read about is they use a high-power pico-pulse laser to help align the grains when writing.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/19890/

"A laser that focuses light into a 30-nanometer-wide spot could be an important advance toward ultra-high-density hard disks. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), and at the University of Houston, in Texas, who have developed the nanolaser, say that it could lead to hard disks with 10 terabits of data packed into a square inch."