Super Storage

Computers are getting smaller and so is storage, but not data. Businesses are being forced to store huge amounts of data. The latest product is the 60TerraByte SAS solid state device from Seagate, the world's largest capacity solid state drive and it fits into a standard 3.5 inch standard hard disk drive slot.

The drive is aimed at data centers. It has twice the density and four times the storage of its nearest competitor. The capacity shows room for 400 million photos or 12,000 DVDs.

"Given the demands on today's data centers, optimal technologies are those that can accommodate an immense amount of data as needed—and without taking up too much space. As such, we are constantly seeking new ways to provide the highest density possible in our all-flash data center configurations," says Mike Vildibill, vice president of Advanced Technologies and Big Data at HP Enterprise.

Seagate has not released pricing details on the 60TB SAS SSD, but it has said the drive will hit the market during 2017.

Hard Drive Capacity

Seagate has demonstrated hard drive technology that squeezes a trillion bits into a single square inch, claiming it’s the first hard drive manufacturer to do so.

During the next 10 years, the company says, this will lead to standard 3.5-inch drives that can store 60 terabytes of information. Today’s 3.5-inch drives (like the one in your current PC) give you three terabytes of storage, stuffing about 620 billion bits into each square inch.

To give you an idea of how much that is, the hard disk contains more bits in a single square inch than the Milky Way has stars.