For a long time, conventional magnetic hard drives had a theoretical limit to storage capacity driven by them storing data on the surface of flat platters. Physical limits on the size of each bit area, and how many platters could fit inside a single hard drive, resulted in huge but still limited capacity. That 2D platter constraint is on the verge of being broken though, with scientists finding a way to also take advantage of the depth or thickness of the platter, turning each platter into a 3d array of data rather than merely 2D. With this technology, we may see drives with a capacity of more than one hundred terabytes! Ponder that for a minute…it’s a truly mind-blowing amount of data for how we use computers today, but perhaps in the future will be laughed at as woefully inadequate like the 64GB drives of today…
Read more over at ExtremeTech – it’s pretty fascinating how they’re pulling this off…each of three layers is written to with a special head, with the reading being the vector sum of the three layers.