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Seagate Hits 1 Terabit Per Square Inch
MrSeb was one of several readers to submit news that drive manufacturer Seagate has announced (and demoed) the first hard drive to squeeze a terabit into each square inch of platter.
"'Initially this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives, but eventually Seagate is promising up to 60TB and 20TB respectively. To achieve such a huge leap in density, Seagate had to use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Basically, the main issue that governs hard drive density is the size of each magnetic 'bit.' These can only be made so small until the magnetism of nearby bits affects them. With HAMR, 'high density' magnetic compounds that can withstand further miniaturization are used. The only problem is that these materials, such as iron platinum alloy, are more stubborn when it comes to writing data — but if you heat it first, that problem goes away. With HAMR, Seagate has strapped a laser to the hard drive head; when it wants to write data, the laser turns on. Reading data is still done conventionally, without the laser. In theory, HAMR should allow for areal densities up to 10 terabits per square inch (magnetic sites that are just 1nm long!), and thus desktop hard drives in the 60TB range."
STOP! It's HAMR time!
Yes, they have strapped a laser to the HAMR head.
Also wondering, will this set back SSD by 5 years?
Probably not: This advance(while definitely helpful to the HDD, and no doubt some very impressive engineering work from the R&D team) is a reinforcement of exactly the same virtues that HDDs have historically had and of virtually no value in addressing their historical weaknesses:
1. Capacity/dollar: Once the production is tooled up, the cost/gigabyte for HDDs can be expected to continue to decline.
2. Linear read/write speed: Because of their high areal density and fairly swift rotation, HDDs can read or write like a bat out of hell as long as they don't have to do much seeking. Seeky or random I/O tanks them because of the need to physically move the head around and possibly wait the better part of a platter rotation for the spot you want.
It will continue to be the case that HDDs are cheap for the capacity, and fast as hell for nice, linear, streaming operations; but SSDs can churn out the random I/O without breaking a sweat and are available in physically smaller and more shock-resistant packages(the economical range for HDDs is basically defined in multiples of the volume of a 2.5inch HDD, and don't drop them, SSDs start at BGAs the size of your fingernail and scale in multiples of those until your wallet explodes...
I've noticed that the more storage you have, the more junk you fill it with. At my work, we have SANs with several Terabytes of storage, mostly filled with junk. When you have millions of useless files, it becomes a tedious task to search, and backup data. In the early days, there was a lot more cleanup of stored data, and only important files were kept on disks.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
As areal density increases on hard drives, so does the transfer rate. The linear density of a track increases, and the amount of data that passes under the head in one rotation of the disc increases. This is how the 5400rpm discs of today have 120MB/s transfer rates compared to the 10MB/s transfer rates of the same rotation speed ten years ago.
Imagining some system you don't own and benchmarks that exist only in your head is not a practical measure of what consumers will own in the future, and rotational media will continue to occupy the same place it does now for the next several years, as the mainstream consumer PC storage product, and as the main data (blu-ray rip) storage and backup media for enthusiasts with SSD operating system drives.
My next system will have a killer refresh rate with a P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium. RISC architecture is gonna change everything. That's too much machine for you.