Japanese company Showa Denko starts shipping 26 TB hard drives

Tokyo-based Showa Denko started shipping 3.5" drives a few days back, while not unusual, these are 26TB drives and use both energy-assisted magnetic recording and SMR (shingled magnetic recording).

"This time, by introducing Showa Denko Group's latest magnetic layer design and technology to produce fine crystals of magnetic substance on the surface of aluminium platter, we successfully developed HD media which have storage capacity of 2.6TB per platter, the largest one in the industry. Thus, the new HD media have pioneered the age of HD media having recording density of 1TB/in2 or higher, and we successfully combined technology to produce fine crystals of magnetic substance with technology to improve rewrite-cycle endurance on the surface of HD media, while maintaining compatibility with shingled magnetic recording (SMR). We will accelerate development of new HD media further, and aim to realize near-line HDD having storage capacity of more than 30TB by the end of 2023."

While large drives already exists - this proves that extreme high capacity drives are not only the future, they are already on their way to a shop near you.