Despite solid state drives increasing in capacity in recent years, the humble platter-based 3.5-inch hard drive still reigns supreme as the data storage device to beat in terms of bits for your buck. But if traditional drives are going to meet user’s ever-increasing data storage demands they will need to improve on the maximum 620 gigabits per square inch storage densities currently possible in platter based 3.5-inch drives. That’s just what Seagate has demonstrated with new technology that has achieved a milestone storage density of 1 terabit per square inch.

From the advent of hard drives in 1956, the magnetic surface of the hard drive platters was divided in sub-micrometer-sized regions called magnetic domains that were oriented horizontally and parallel to the disk surface in what was called longitudinal recording. But around 2005/2006, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) was introduced, which changed the orientation to perpendicular to allow for closer magnetic domain spacing and increase data storage capacity.