Seagate has unveiled plans to produce a 16-terabyte hard drive. Currently, the data storage company only offers a maximum of 10 terabytes in their hard drive products.

16 terabyte hard drive. The plan for larger size hard drives was announced during a conference call where the data storage company released its earnings for the second fiscal quarter of this year. Steve Luczo, Chairman and CEO of Seagate Technology presented a blueprint showing the next 18 months for the company which includes expanding the storage capacity of their hard drives further, 16-terabyte hard drives by 2018 and 20-terabyte hard drives by 2020.

The American data storage company has a wide range of data storage products with the largest capacity being at 10 terabytes. "Our eight terabyte product leads the market in cost and performance and we are pleased with the ramp of our 10-terabyte product in terms of quality, performance, and customer qualifications," Luczo said.

Seagate released its 10-terabyte hard drive roughly a year ago and is now busy working on a helium-based 12-terabyte hard drive by having it tested by consumers and compiling feedback. The current 10-terabyte hard drive is also helium-based with the helium reducing the friction and resistance caused by spinning platters positioned close to each other. The platters are where data is actually stored.

The reduced friction and resistance help in lowering the amount of power the hard drive needs as well as the level of cooling. This practically allows for more platters put in and increase storage capacity. The 10-terabyte hard drive currently houses seven platters along with 14 read/write heads.

Regular hard drives are seeing competition from NAND-based solid state drives or SSDs which use cells rather than platters and actually allow for more capacity and faster boot and program load times. SSDs were initially expensive but have since become more affordable turning HDDs into secondary options for storage.

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