Wired.

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PITTSBURGH -- As Gordon Moore is to transistors, Seagate CTO Mark Kryder is to "areal density" -- a measure of how tightly data can be packed onto the surface of a disk. In a conference room overlooking the Allegheny River, he describes the coming storm in magnetic technology.

"When I joined Seagate, the idea of conquering 100 Gb per square inch seemed unimaginable," Kryder said. "Even 20 seemed unlikely."

In the eight years since then, however, Kryder and his colleagues at Seagate Research have stuffed 421 Gb per square inch onto test platters, and they're only getting warmed up. On a crisp December day -- one that also saw the death of Seagate founder Al Shugart -- Wired News yanked them out of the lab to get an exclusive tour of their Pittsburgh research headquarters, and a look at what you'll be buying in 2012.

White-coated scientists lurk in dust-free rooms, protected from environmental contaminants by massive glass panes and a complex air-recycling system. Amid dozens of labs at the 300,000 square-foot facility, machines of Gilliam-esque oddness and complexity whirr, surrounded by piles of technology it will take years for even a few of us to use.

The world's brightest young electrical engineers handle grains of magnetic matter so tiny they are measured by the nanometer, clumped into the smallest possible configurations that can hold a single bit of data.

Operating at the very edge of understood physics, the magnetic material can be shrunk only so small, thanks to the so-called superparamagnetic limit -- a barrier Seagate has spent millions of dollars fighting.

"When you go down (to the disk surface), you'll find it's made of a lot of tiny grains," Kryder said. "Each is a single crystal of magnetic material.... The reality is, if you make the grain small enough, it becomes unstable."

Their current solution to this problem is recording data perpendicular to the plane of the media. This technology, however, is expected to peak out at about 1 terabit per square inch. In the next decade, Seagate plans to hit the market with twin technologies that could fly far beyond, ultimately offering as much as 50 terabits per square inch. On a standard 3.5-inch drive, that's equivalent to 300 terabits of information, enough to hold the uncompressed contents of the Library of Congress.

First up is heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, which uses lasers to momentarily heat the disk surface and allow the drive heads to write information. When the surface of the drive cools, the bits settle into a more stable state for longer-term reliability. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum.

"The sizes are at the tens of nanometers in HAMR," said Mark Re, senior vice president of research. "There's really cool physics."

"Time constants are of the order of 150 picoseconds," said Kryder. "That's a very short timeframe."

But laser-powered disk drives are only one side of the coin. It will take so-called bit-pattern media to add the tail to HAMR's head.

"HAMR helps with the writing process," said Eric Riedel, head of interfaces and architecture at Seagate Research. "Bit patterning allows us to create the media."

On current disks, each bit is represented by an island of about 50 magnetic grains, but these patches are irregularly shaped, like ink on newsprint: Each dot must cover a certain area if it is to remain distinct. By chemically encoding an organized molecular pattern onto the platter's substrate at the moment of creation, however, HAMR can put a single bit on every grain.

"It allows you to redefine a lot of things that were limitations you had to live with," said Seagate researcher Ren J.M. van de Veerdonk. "With these technologies you have circumvented them."

Disk sectors will become a thing of the past, replaced by self-organized magnetic arrays, lithographically patterned along a platter's circumferential tracks.

"An iron platinum particle is stable down to 2.5 nanometers," Re said. "And to write on it, you'll need HAMR."

Though together seen as the future of mass storage by Seagate's researchers, HAMR and bit patterning are just two of the technologies under development at the research center in Pittsburgh, which prides itself on a collaborative work environment.

Seagate isn't solely interested in traditional mass storage, either, and plans to crash flash memory's party with "Probe," a non-volatile, magnetic-based media that will come in tiny form factors.

Seagate and its competitors spend billions annually on research, but the consequences of technological decisions made now may not become apparent for years to come.

Like angels dancing on the tip of a needle, two bits can't be in the same place at the same time. But you can still pack 'em damn tight.

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That's a lot of space.