Hard drive manufacturer Seagate became the first company to reach the storage density of 1 terabit per square inch. The achievement will pave the way for even larger hard drives like a 60 terrabyte drive in the next ten years.

Seagate was able to achieve the milestone by using its patented heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The technology uses nanotube-based lubrication to allow the head of a disk drive to get closer to the surface of a spinning platter in order to store more data. Using HAMR, Seagate was able to achieve a linear bit density of about 2 million bits per inch which is 55 percent higher than the current density ceiling of 620 gigabits per square inch.

"The growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity," said Mark Re, SVP of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate, in a statement. "Hard disk drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage, and store digital content."

HAMR could theoretically produce hard drives with densities of about 10 terabits per square inch. The maximum capacity of today's standard 3.5 inch hard drives is just 3TB while 2.5 inch drives only go up to 750Gb with HAMR drives these could double. A 60TB hard drive is even possible for desktops and laptops in the next ten years.

Although HAMR would provide a significant leap forward for hard drives the technology still has some problems. As more bits per square inch are packed together the data tracks are tightened which can cause magnetic disruption between bits of data. This causes a supermagenetic effect which causes bits to flip their magnetic poles which in turn causes data errors. Despite these challenges HAMR technology is still the next step in hard drive technology so consumers should be prepared for more storage capacity for their data.