TDK Fires Up Lasers to Double Hard Drive Capacity
 

TDK has developed a procedure to double disk drive capacity by adding a laser heater through a process called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). No word yet on when this may be available or what the cost of a HAMR HDD would be. Current perpendicular magnetic recording technology will hit a brick wall in a generation or two: as the size of each stored bit shrinks, the disk capacity increases, but the platters lose their ability to hold the magnetic direction for each bit in a stable manner.

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2011/10/...rive_capacity/