Hitachi and NEDO Develop 3.9Tbit per Square Inch HDD Technology

Japanese researchers have developed a new HDD technology that could boost the capacity of hard disk drives to 24TB.

The New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Japan's public management organization that promotes research and development on energy and environmental technologies, National University Corporation Tokyo Institute of Technology, Kyoto University and Hitachi, have succesfully developed a HDD technology for storing data at a density of 3.9Tbit per square inch.

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Well, hmm... my desktop can house up to 4 HDDs internally. That would then mean up to 96 terabytes of storage. What would one ever do with that much capacity?

Fill it with non-family friendly entertainment like we've always been doing, I suppose?

Actually, HDD size isn't my main concern, but lifetime. When 2GB-80GB drives died back in the day, it was no big deal, their small size meant we were pretty much forced to burn backups every other week or so. Nowadays with 320GB and 500GB machines, it's too easy to procrastinate: "there's still a lot of space left".

Now imagine if you had everything all in one huge drive, and on one fine day it decides to go south. Not looking forward to that. I'd rather have a RAID 1 array rather than one huge basket with all my eggs in it.