Here's an excellent technology from Japanese giant Hitachi that can possibly increase hard drive capacity by five times. Reportedly, the firm has developed a new hard drive technology through which it was able to cram 2.5 Terabits of data per square inch. This new technology is based on heat-assisted magnetic recording system.

Currently used perpendicular magnetic recording technology achieves 1 terabits per square inch density, but this new technology far exceeds anything the storage world has ever seen.

The technology makes use of a magnetic recording head and a light source module which emits ultrasmall 20nm light beam.

By using appropriate combination of disk media and recording heads, bits of 28nm width and 9nm length can be formed.

No word on when Hitachi plans to release hard drives based on this new technology.