A new game-changing innovation to the decades-old hard drive

Our need for storage space is becoming bigger than ever: The file sizes of 4K Movies, Graphics-demanding games, and ultra-high resolution photos and music are so big that we can easily fill up a 1TB hard drive these days. Right now, Western Digital, SanDisk and Seagate offer the biggest hard drives at 12TB through using Helium technology (here’s an explanation of how it works).

12TB may seem large, but with increasing file sizes, it is so easy to fill that up. To give some perspective, a 4K Movie is roughly around 100GB in size. A 120-megapixel RAW file? Expect around 210MB per photo.

So the question remains: How do you expand the storage capacity of a 3.5-inch (or 2.5-inch) hard drive? Through a new technology called “microwave-assisted magnetic recording”, or MAMR.

Introduced by Western Digital, this new tech makes use of a “spin torque oscillator”–which as they describe “increases the ability to record data at ultra-high density without sacrificing reliability.” According to Western Digital, MAMR will give future hard drives the ability to record over 4 terabits-per-square-inch. With such ability, hard drives can store as much as 40TB of space without changing the size. As for the timeline, Western Digital stated in their article that 40TB hard drives will be realized by 2025, and can expand further beyond the suggested maximum storage capacity.

Here’s a video to explain what MAMR is all about:

What do you think of Western Digital’s latest hard drive innovation? Comment down below!

Source: Gizmodo