Hard drive producers suggest heating up magnetic film (which is used for information storage) with laser to overcome the limits that the laws of physics put on the technology.

The majority of today’s computers use hard drives, but experts say the technology is about to push the limit. Information is stored on an HDD on rotating platters covered with thin magnetic film. Recording head floats just over the surface and rearranges magnetic particles to write and read bits and bytes in spiralling rows.

The problem is that as the consumers grow hungrier for extra gigabytes, producers have to pack the rows together more tightly. Today’s HDDs have just hundreds of nanometres between those rows, and if the trend continues, magnetic charges indicating 1s and 0s will become too week to hold data reliably.

Science Magazine reports that leading US hard drive manufacturer Seagate says that heating platters with a laser beam while the magnetic head is working with information can make the storage more stable. The research team has developed a new device called a near-field transducer, which focuses a laser beam to an area of less then 75 nanometres – or ten times less then the narrowest conventional laser.