HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018 (anandtech.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Unfortunately the hard disk drive industry is not ready to go live with Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The technology is yet not reliable enough for mass production. Over the years, producers of hard drives, platters and recording heads have revealed various possible timeframes for commercial availability of drives with HAMR technology. Their predictions were not accurate. The current goalpost is set to year 2018. While solid state disks based on Flash memory keep seeing rapid improvements as well, HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds. The areal density of HAMR products is predicted to exceed 1.5 Tb per square inch.

Comments

Random access speed more important than throughput

[JoeyRox]

The summary lists HDDs as viable vs SSDs when "high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds" but in most applications it's the random access time that's more useful and SSDs are better than HDDs in this regard by several orders of magnitude.

Areal density...

[MachineShedFred]

Dear Dice Editors:

If you are going to post a summary which says what *might* be possible in the future, it's helpful to know what the current state-of-the-art is. For example, if you are going to have a summary that says the areal density of HAMR products is predicted to exceed 1.5 Tb per square inch it would be nice to know that Seagate is already shipping a drive with 1.34Tb/in^2 according to Wikipedia.

As it turns out, context matters when giving statistics, or there is no reference to know if the statistic means anything. Given what I found in 30 seconds of using Google, that would mean that HAMR is expected to yield ~12% increase in density from the current state-of-the-art.

You're welcome.