HGST, the recently purchased research division at Western Digital is promising to double the density of platter drives over the next few years, enhancing the longevity of a storage media that many already consider obsolete.  However, like tape and optical media there continue to be many scenarios where inexpensive high density storage is more useful than the speed offered by an SSD.  Using a combination of self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting they are hitting a density of 1.2 trillion bits per square inch, not quite the density of the salted drives we heard about in 2011 but perhaps much closer to market.  Each of those dots is 10nm in size and because of the self assembling nature of the pattern HGST told The Register that they expect to be able to shrink the size of those dots even more as their process matures.

"HGST, the Western Digital subsidiary formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, says it has developed a method of manufacturing hard-disk platters using nanotechnology that could double the density of today's hard drives."

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