Hard drives remain a vital component in building high-capacity storage solutions, especially in the data center. IT Home reports that Seagate is continuing to break barriers on how many TBs can be stored on a single hard drive and has achieved a whopping 6.9TB per platter in its laboratory, making 55TB to 69TB hard drives a possibility for the first time.

Seagate's experimental 6.9TB platter boasts more than double the capacity of platters it uses in official products right now. Outgoing models such as Seagate's 30TB HAMR HDDs use 10 3TB platters to reach maximum capacity. With 6.9TB platters, Seagate will be able to build drives with more than double the capacity of its outgoing drives in the same form factor.

Seagate is leveraging its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology to deliver its 6.9TB platter. If you want to check out how Seagate's HAMR technology works, check out our previous coverage. In a nutshell, HAMR uses heat-induced magnetic coercivity to write to a hard drive platter. In Seagate's outgoing drives, this tech is combined with Mozaic 3+ to reduce the media grain size compared to typical HDD platters.