Originally Posted By: Archeon
Hard drives development seems to have stagnated in the last couple of years. Up until a few years, drive sizes were rapidly increasing. It seemed like every so many months, the capacity doubled. That came to a halt once the 1TB barrier was reached. Then everything slowed down considerably. It took a lot of time before the 1.5 TB drives were released, and now 2TB has been the maximum size for quite some time (2 years?). So what are HD manufacturers doing with that 'extra time'?

You're assuming that they can just scale their existing technology forever. The HD manufacturers aren't just going oh well people have enough storage we'll just sit here and wait.

The jumps in areal density are because they're introducing new technology to boost the number of bits you can pack onto a platter. The last big jump in storage capacity was because of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) being added which significantly reduced the size of each bit. They're getting close to the limits of this technology for HDs and the next generation technology just isn't ready yet. Read this article.