Bit patterned recoding, announced by Toshiba last year, breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains, onto which a bit of data can be stored.

HAMR uses a laser to pre-heat a platinum alloy as a material onto which bits of data can be recorded. The technology allows smaller bits of data to be written closer together without causing the superparamagnetic effect, which simply means that as two magnetically-charged nanoparticles are placed in close proximity, they have a tendency to randomly flip direction causing data corruption.

"There are products that will be announced over the next 12 months," Rydning said. "It's a long runway to develop those technologies and bring them to market."

On the client side, Seagate's only offering has been a hybrid drive, or an HDD that includes a small amount of NAND flash with a controller. The hybrid drive aims to provide improved performance without the high cost of pure a SSD.

Seagate's first attempt at selling hybrid drives failed to gain market adoption.