Hard drive manufacturers are constantly trying to cram as much data as possible. They use every trick in the book to do that. This new technique involves turning up the heat. And it may give us 40 terabyte hard drives by the year 2020.

We're not even pass 5TB today, and we could get 40 by 2020? It sounds very ambitious but first lets explain a couple of things.

It is easier to induce and reverse a magnetic field as the temperature increases. This is how data is written and read on a hard drive.

TDK has developed a new laser system that will temporarily heat up an area where the data is being written to, which in turn will allow them to squeeze in more data.

The approach was made possible because of lasers. TDK refers to it as a near-field light generator. The beam's about 1/10 as wide as the lasers used to read a Blu-ray disk.

TDK is confident it could be implemented in commercial products as early as late 2015. [DigInfo TV]