History
- In 1954, engineers working for RCA filed a patent which described the basic principle of using heat in conjunction with a magnetic field to record data. This was followed by many other patents in this area with the initial focus on tape storage.
- In the 1980s, a class of mass storage device called the magneto-optical drive became commercially available which used essentially the same technique for writing data to a disk. One advantage of magneto-optic recording over purely magnetic storage at that time was that the bit size was defined by the size of the focused laser spot rather than the magnetic field. In 1988, a 5.25-inch magneto-optic disk could hold 650 megabytes of data with a roadmap to several gigabytes; a single 5.25" magnetic disk had a capacity of around 100 megabytes.
- Hard disk technology progressed rapidly and as of January 2012, desktop hard disk drives typically had a capacity of 500 to 2000 gigabytes, while the largest-capacity drives were 4 terabytes. It was recognised as early as 2000 that the then current technology for hard disk drives would have limitations and that heat-assisted recording was one option to extend the storage capacity.
Read more about this topic: Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording
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