If you thought recent advances in PC hard drives were something, it’s possible you haven’t seen anything yet. If Toshiba is to be believed based on its announcements Wednesday at the Magnetic Recording Conference in San Diego, it’s made a breakthrough in its research of bit-patterned media that could make even the spacious 2TB and 3TB at the top of today’s storage food chain look minuscule.

Today’s drives store data contiguously on hundreds of magnetic grains (or bits) spread across the surface of a disk. Because there’s little break between the north pole of one bit and the south pole of another, this leads to unreliability and the possibility that bits will “flip” when the head passes over them.

Bit-patterned media, on the other hand, divides the recording surface (the magnetic layer) into many uniform sections (or servo patterns), each of which contains only a few of those magnetic grains. Each of these (17nm dots manufactured using an etching mask made of a self-assembled polymer), can hold one bit of data, which theoretically allows for astonishingly higher areal densities than we see today. Assembling the data into patterns of rows (with nonmagnetic gaps between them) mimics markers to make it easy and quicker to locate the stored data again later. (According to a Toshiba press release, when bit-patterned media is used for even higher recording densities, the dot size will be reduced to less than 10nm.)”

Toshiba’s media is still in the prototype stage, but is claiming that using a practical server pattern allows about 2.5 terabits (Tb) of data per square inch—about 300GB stored in an area approximately the size of a postage stamp, and nearly five times what is available on even the highest-capacity drives today (541 Gb per square inch). This could mean about 25TB of storage on one 3.5-inch drive.

Will Toshiba