The technique should hold up in the real world despite ditching typical photolithography, the company says: the nanoimprinting remains useful in the error-prone world of storage, and it should scale as the patterns get smaller.
By first splitting the molecules into very small lines and then using an equally rare nanoimprinting technology to put them into circular tracks, HGST can create platters with a 10 nanometer-wide bit pattern that's twice as dense as current hard drives.