Microwave Tech Could Produce 40TB Hard Drives In the Near Future (gizmodo.com)

Western Digital has announced a potential game changer that promises to expand the limits of traditional HDDs to up to 40TBs using a microwave-based write head, and the company says it will be able to the public in 2019. Gizmodo reports: Western Digital's new approach, microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), can utilize the company's existing production chain to cram a lot more storage onto a 3.5-inch disk. In a technical overview, Western Digital says it has managed to overcome the biggest issue with traditional HDD drive storage -- the size of the write head. These days, an average hard drive maxes out in the 10-14TB range. But by integrating a new write head, "a spin torque oscillator," microwaves can create the energy levels necessary for copying data within a lower magnetic field than was ever previously possible. There's a more thorough white paper for those who want to dive in. According to Western Digital, MAMR has "the capability to extend areal density gains up to 4 Terabits per square inch." By the year 2025, it hopes to be packing 40TBs into the same size drive it offers today.

Comments

"the company says it will be able to the public"

[Zontar The Mindless]

C'mon, guys, can't you even be troubled to proofread the very first sentence?

Few people cares

[should_be_linear]

Above 1 TB only geeks and IT companies care. Just like it was case for CCD above 10 Megapixel. At 1 TB disk is "solved" problem for general audience and things that matter now are performance and durability.

Re:Few people cares

[avandesande]

With higher density you get better performance, so yeah it matters to most people

Re:Few people cares

[Spamalope]

IT department of a regular business trying to backup a VMware install will care, as that's usually to a bulk storage box.

Demand for increased storage will build, the question is how fast. People collecting 4k content can use up that space easily. 40T is speculated by 2025, which will be well into the 4k transition. 10gb ethernet is getting cheaper. If that hits consumer price levels, it'll be easier for average people to handle higher storage volumes. Faster video cards and high rez target game resolutions mean massively more texture size and 100GB+ games.

Of course you'll get the density performance gains too.

This is keeping the hard drive alive longer, allowing time for solid state pricing to improve for longer before it stops being viable to produce hard drives. A few others have made good points about how things like cheaper cloud storage does help average folks by reducing prices, or making cloud backup for products standard because it's cheap.

Re:Few people cares

[sensei moreh]

Above 1 TB only geeks and IT companies care.

And 640K of memory should be enough for anybody.

Re:Few people cares

[Kjella]

On an operating system with working symlinks, you can install part of a game on ssd, and part on HDD. It's only amateur hour windows where this is still a problem.

Acutally Windows 7+ has symbolic links. But while that's technically true, you'd still have to identify which files go where and redo it every time you install the game and if an updates changes any file paths or folder structures it might not stick. Steam could push a standard split where publishers could put up to say 10% of the installation files in a folder marked for acceleration. Make a 20GB game? Max 2GB goes in that special folder. Of course you could pick that both folders are the same, all 20GB on the SSD or all 20GB on the HDD - or 2GB on the SSD 18GB on the HDD. That way even a 128GB SSD would get you far, paired with a HDD. Today you can barely install a few big games before it's full.

Re:Few people cares

[guruevi]

1TB is surprisingly small these days. Most people I know have ~500GB in home videos and pictures alone, let alone media they may still have for iPod's and similar devices.

2-4TB is right now the range in what most "consumers" buy hard drives at. Not because of availability, but because of necessity.

It does matter

[datavirtue]

Some of you are missing the ramifications of this. Even though this is magnetic media it will drive down the cost of cloud storage. Right now it is cheap, but not that cheap. This could make is feasible for everyone to store all of their data in cloud for pennies a year....encrypted of course.

Re:"the company says it will be able to the public

[thegarbz]

Give them a break. Every so often everyone accidentally a whole word.

Re:"the company says it will be able to the public

[Mr D from 63]

The bigger news here is that 2025 is the near future.

Re:"the company says it will be able to the public

[tomxor]

It's the internet gremlins! They a word and then poop them out in some other random part of the eat sentence. Gremlins I tells ya!

Re:Wonderful but when will 10,12 and 14TB drop $$$

[guruevi]

As always, the drops will come when the new tech arrives. 10TB drives are about half the price (~$350) now as they were when they came out (~$6-800). A 5TB drive is now at the $100-150 price point so it's dropped by 30-50%.