ddrueding said:
I don't like the idea of intentionally creating heat, or including additional components (optics) into drives.
Seagate has been playing with HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) in the lab for *years* getting impressive results with "old style" longitudinal recording. I would venture to guess that Seagate initially got this idea from exploring Magneto-Optical recording technology -- of which they never released a product, though Hitachi, Maxtor, and Sony have.
Like M-O recording, I believe the idea behind HAMR is to heat a very localised spot on a single track where the recoding will take place, not a broad swath across the surface of the platter(s).
Still, I basically see little to no future for HAMR (or HAMR like) recording technologies in the very important mobile storage device marketplace. Power requirements for HAMR (or HAMR like) recording technologies may limit this sort of storage to desktop, server, or SAN / NAS storage racks.