''Researchers Build Hard Drive of Future With Lasers... Typically, data is written to hard drives using magnetic fields. ... Heat has long been the enemy of this technique, because it distorts the fields. But with their paper, Ostler and crew have shown a way using heat that changes a material’s polarization without using magnetic fields, storing thousands of gigabytes of data in a single second. Basically, their laser blasts a 60-femtosecond pulse — that’s 60 quadrillionths of a second — onto a material made primarily of iron and gadolinium. ... The whole process, the paper claims, happens in less than 5 picoseconds, or 5 trillionths of a second. '' [source] A tera in 1 second sounds good enough... as long as they don't make another disk! :> Solid state should be the thing, disks are so XX century :D :D