By perfecting its proprietary heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, dramatically increasing the density of bits per square inch of platter, Seagate says it can offer 60 TB hard drives by the end of the decade.

Contemporary 3.5 inch drives have a density of approximately 620 gigabits per square inch; laptop drives have a density of 500 gigabits. Considering this density, drives have a capacity of maximum capacity of 3TB and 500GB respectively.

With Seagate’s HAMR technology, density will be increased to 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch.

“Hard disk drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content,” Mark Re, a Seagate vice president, said in a statement.

“The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion.”

HAMR has been in ‘development hell’ for quite some time now. In 2002 Seagate claimed it could have HAMR on the market by 2008. In 2004, the company revised that projection claiming it wouldn’t be ready until 2010.

“We’re on track for commercialization around mid-decade,” the company said this week.