Hard drive manufacterers introduce two new ways to increase storage space.

As flash storage technology continues to get more advanced, and as laptops begin to use flash as their main method of storage, hard drive manufacterers are beginning to get creative to keep their sales. Starting last year, perpendicualr hard drive technology has allowed the density, and space, of new hard drives to increase by roughly 50% a year. However, if drives continue gaining density at this rate, they could eventually become dense enough to magnetize and erase themselves at room temperature. While we won't have to worry about this for a few years, it is definitely a concern. And so, Seagate and Hitachi have come up with solutions to this problem. Seagate is going to begin implementing "heat assisted technology", which adds the heating of the hard drive platters to the recording process. Hitachi will use "patterned media", which is a reorganization of the recording platters in a hard drive.