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The Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage (ieee.org)
For several decades, the areal density of hard disks increased by an average of nearly 40 percent each year. But in recent years, that rate has slowed to around 10 percent. Seagate and Western Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, differ with each other on how to get around this. From a report: In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020. If one company's solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage. Companies that wish to store huge amounts of data do have other options, but hard drives are still the go-to choice for enterprise storage needs that fall somewhere between faster, more expensive solid-state drives built on flash memory, and slower, cheaper magnetic tape.
Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.
Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.
Once they get down to about $100, I guess a few drives would be enough to backup all the devices in my home, and maybe store some other media.
Until then rsync diffs to a remote NAS will be good enough.
There isn't much on my systems that can't be downloaded again after installing extra apps and my personal data.
Thermal cycling is known to weaken materials (not good for things spinning at a high speed for long periods of time,) while microwave emission is generally hard to control in a cheap and precise way.
Every time I see posts about hard drives getting bigger, I wonder: how long until they're no longer practical due to concerns about data safety? Backing up a large drive is already difficult.
Then again, I would really like to see them make this kind of progress with SSD... A 10TB SSD would be a wonderful thing. :)
-- sigs cause cancer.
Oversupply this year signals a price drop so the cost advantage is disappearing.
Similar to how floppies, zip disks, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs have cropped. Tape is still around, but only for niche things. I see HDD going the same way.
There are only 4 customers for hard drives anymore:
1) The NSA
2) Amazon (to outsource/share storage/data with NSA)
3) Google (to outsource/share storage/data with NSA)
4) IBM (for reasons unknown)
Consumer retail is a tiny sliver of all hard drive sales.
So what does /. think about the below?
I am uneasy about 2TB+ drives. The way I see it, that is a lot of data running on a single/small set of failure points. At about 2TB, that's about all the corporate data I generate over 2-3 years.
Each year I trim out a lot of stuff and zip it to about ~50GB of important, must keep, stuff. With 2TB drives, we tend to just keep everything.
And I just feel more is at risk with few protections. One stolen laptop, bad disk jolt, header jitter, etc and so much is gone. I just feel one big drive is so much more risker than multiple drives.
And network backups don't really protect enough because the communications channels are so slow. Most still operate at 50-100mbps. Restoring a lost drive takes forever and that long single write run isn't something these drives are designed for.
And even in servers, isn't 6 raided drives better than 2? Thoughts?
Have you bought an SSD lately? They are mostly air as it is. There is absolutely no reason these couldn't be packed with newer chips to the same degrees as the solid bricks these drives were a few years back to make 200+TB SSDs. There is no particular reason that we need magnetic drives or similar capacity SSDs should cost significantly more. The drive manufacturers just have a common interest in maximizing return on every bit of infrastructure they own and have formed a consensus around it.
This isn't much different than the Telcos continuing to sell "T1" lines with nonsense about SLAs and guaranteed bandwidth. It had very little to do with offering the best product they could and almost everything to do with maximizing margins at consumer expense.
I'm not saying it isn't good for their businesses but when it comes to technology, artificial scarcity like this impacts R&D and availability of products and services for everyone else in a very pronounced negative way.
Tech companies (and others) are forming virtual international monopolies because they actually understand the work of John Nash and that there is more profit to be had by collaborating. This simply does too much damage for the rest of us to allow in certain key areas like Food production, healthcare, energy, defense, communications and especially technology.
Most free market economists do not account for the work of Nash. The entire concept of an unrestricted market which naturally organizes due to competition and market pressures breaks in a very serious way when you can prove that it can be more profitable to cycle non-loyal consumers between a small number of competitors than to actually compete with them in areas in which would reduce margins for all competitors.
It's HAMR. HAMR will beat MAMR.
I don't mean that HAMR will succeed -- it might not come to anything, and/or some new thing might appear that is even more successful -- but between the two, it's HAMR over MAMR.
Because it's not mostly about manufacturing costs or speed or reliability. It's about sales. Guys will buy HAMMER tech and avoid the clearly breast-referencing MAMR, and non-tech folks are NOT going to want obviously cancer-causing microwaves in their laptop.
It's not about logic, it's not about technical merit, it's obvious which one can sell and which one cannot.
They should rename MAMR Wave Assist Recording, because WAR would stand a marketing chance against HAMR.
Just breakout of the 3.5 form factor. Problem solved.
Duh!
Is no one working on optical storage anymore? I would think there are more opportunities to increase speed/density there than with magnetic storage.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Or in the case of hard disks, a few terabytes.
I'm actually semi-serious: it seems to me that the days of mechanical storage are numbered. With SSDs, and now Intel's XPoint, one can seriously hope that hard disks will be phased out just as floppies were. Fewer mechanical parts ought to mean more reliability, not to mention the obvious speed advantages. Granted, I did buy two hard-disks last year, but only to replace disks in an existing NAS. Those might well be the last ones I ever buy...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Don't worry, software will bloat along at the same pace!
Every time I see posts about hard drives getting bigger, I wonder: how long until they're no longer practical due to concerns about data safety? Backing up a large drive is already difficult.
Backing up a large drive has ALWAYS been difficult. The only thing that changes is the size of the number. Some of my early machines have 40MB hard drives and I had no practical means to back up that much data at the time. Now it might be 40TB but the problem is the same and so are many of the solutions. Back then we had tape, second hard drives, removable discs. Today we have... tape, hard drives and removable disks (solid state or optical instead of floppies). The more things change the more they stay the same.
Then again, I would really like to see them make this kind of progress with SSD... A 10TB SSD would be a wonderful thing. :)
How about 30TB?
ceph with more smaller disks can be better then 3-6 super big disks with high rebuild times.
need more pci-e lanes / bigger pch link to make a few sdd really not get speed capped.
Even a few sata ones can over an pch link and / or an SAS back plane
The idea that tape is somehow cheaper than spinning disks is an idea that dates back to the last century. Yes the individual tape is cheaper than a commensurate amount of disk storage but by the time you add in the drive cost, the robot cost, the software cost, the recovery cost (to hard drives) and the electricity then suddenly the tape cost is now greater than the cost of the disk. Even if you take the tapes out of the robot and store them on a shelf the cost today of hard drives is cheaper than tape.
The major selling point of optical was cheap distribution of read-only data like music and video CDs, DVDs, and Blue-Ray.
Streaming makes this much less important. Sure, it would be ncie to have a consumer-priced "super blue ray" reader that could store a full-length 3D 8K movie but when most people would rather stream it, do I really want to spend the money to develop such a device?
Yes, there are still two important reasons for optical media that will keep the market alive for at least another decade or two, but they aren't the "huge" market that drives fast innovation:
* Video collectors, who still want a "factory made" medium like a DVD to put on their bookshelves. For music, Vinyl serves a similar purpose.
* Archivist, who need the long-term storage provided by "1000 year" (note the quotation marks) metallic-dye optical media that will probably last at least 50 years under archival conditions.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you work in a datacenter I'm guessing this is good news everyone!, but my own storage needs have (somehow, for completely unrelated reasons *cough*) gone down since the advent of streaming services such as Netflix.
Sure, games are getting bigger but I'm not a teenager anymore, so I buy maybe a dozen games per year at the most. Last year I only bought seven and that number is inflated because I bought a cheap bundle of five games on Steam.
#DeleteFacebook
Ok, yes if you save it in the cloud then you data will at some point will be save on some sort of storage medium, most likely a magnetic hard drive(s).
However for normal consumer usage. 1tb is more then enough, and it has been that way for a long time, because most of the data that we consume is on the cloud and in general while it is on the cloud the data is more optimized. For example, if you are to backup all your applications, on the cloud normally there would be one copy for thousands of users, and redundant data would be better optimized, such as with a differential data backup vs what we did in the past is a full backup even if you didn't change anything in years.
This is part of the reason why Cloud services can give you these big storage amounts for much less then you can get your own drive.
The companies putting money in magnetic storage, I hope they are not targeting the consumer market for those. Because I think the heyday of selling big drives to everyone is over, especially when people get a new system with a fast NVME drive. Because having a fast snappy PC is much more important for many people then just having gigs of data available but not touched.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just look at Backblaze's regular storage updates. They clearly show that WD and Seagate have much, much lower quality on their drives than Toshiba and Hitachi. As with many other things, the American brands are more popular because of aggressive advertising, but hold much lower quality than, typically, the Japanese brands.
If you still need HDDs, you will do yourself a favor by buying Toshiba and Hitachi (or HGST).
Sure, the performance would hit bottlenecks (does now, it isn't like there aren't SANs populated with SSD now)... but how is that not a better problem to have than having slow and low capacity magnetic storage? Solid state scales to well over 200TB per disk with existing technology if they package it that way and the silicon isn't any more expensive than in the past when the chips were lower capacity, it is just more efficiently utilized.
I'm speaking to a technical crowd, so technically yes, some of the newer fab technologies require longer exposures and the like but nothing that can even begin to explain the small capacities and massive premium they are charging for these drives. They used to largely use the premium prices to pay for the R&D and new equipment and then drop prices. Now they ride the higher prices as long as they can and use articles like this to misdirect people... the next high capacity low cost storage technology already exists, they just don't want to race to the bottom.
This is a great idea. Exactly the same width as the SATA+POWER connector -- 4.5cm. Honestly it doesn't buy you much space, but you can lock out the platter drives. The companies which ONLY make SSDs should definitely be doing this.
Put a couple of notches into them, so they snap in -- no vibration issues demanding screws. You don't need a metal frame around them. Hot-swappable in a sexy way without having to have expensive extra carriers. They should have a standardized hole in the plastic at the front to allow you to snap in a tab/handle for easy pulling.
They'd fit in little carriers (Wee! Something else to sell!) to make them fit 3.5 inch screw-in spaces, and make people think 3.5" is an archaic form, like the 5.25" adapters for 3.5" drives did.
This would establish the new standard without alienating anyone, and basically put the platter companies out of business. No one is going to retool to make even smaller platters.
Oh, wait. Did you mean that the platter companies should start selling 5.25" drives again? Oh, that's is so not gonna work.
The next time someone fucks up Deathstar style, it will be the end of spinning magnetic storage.
Hammer
Mammer (ies)
Makes me think of Thor's hammer, vs nice tits
"Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year", Western Digital has been so far behind in delivering things it promises I wouldn't count on this in any way. Seagate has been shipping 8tb desktop drives for a while now and Western Digital still doesn't have a 8TB Blue or Black drive listed on their website.
You're an idiot. There are competing manufacturers and competing integrators. The price on SSDs reflect a global game of chicken, as each vendor is trying to maximize the price while still undercutting their competition.
And no, it's not the cost of sand, idiot. Creating silicon wafers isn't free, and turning them into chips isn't cheap. packaging them is pretty cheap, but chips with that many gates have a very high failure rate.
HAMR, from the name alone scares me a little, knowing nothing of the technology. And, I'm sure I could do some research and will wait for reviews, but initial impressions do take a toll.
My concern would be that cooling, and managing excessive heat inside a small case is already a major problem. So, how they generate the heat? how do they prevent heat leakage or handle cooling? these would be some of my concerns as a hobbyist picking a new drive;
Though, these might not ever be targeted to the home user.
Yep, it was inevitable as soon as the selected CPU was an 8088. And that falls on IBM.
The unseen miracle is the amazing way the DOS platform was migrated through various phases of 286/386 protected mode features until NT/XP.
Hitachi is phasing out; WD bought it.
Great news for me....I'm a media whore. My home fileserver has 40tb of space and it's full, spread across 20 or so hard drives of varying size, age and brand.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
I suspect the distinction is simply to allow one company to get around the other company's patents. HDD areal density is currently at about 1 Gb per square inch, or 155 Mb per cm^2. Each bit thus has an area of about 800x800 nm.
Microwaves have a wavelength of roughly 12 cm, which is 150,000 times bigger than 800nm. There's no way you could aim microwaves precisely enough to heat up the surface area that represents a single bit on a disk platter. Both HAMR and MAMR probably just rely on injecting a small amount of heat quickly enough that only the platter surface closest to the heating element experiences substantial temperature increase.
Beta was far superior to VHS. Guess who won that battle. L-1011 vs. DC-10, ugh! Then we have Mac vs. PC, uh oh!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Frankly, I'd be surprised if these magnetic media companies are still in business in a few years. SSDs are destroying their market. On the low end, you can get 128GB for half the price of the cheapest HDD. Where every new computer used to mean a HDD was sold in the past, now an SSD takes that place, kneecapping cash flow for the HDD manufacturers. SSDs are killing HDDs on lower price, lower heat/power consumption, lower noise, and higher speed. Only the people with extremely large data space requirements are going to be buying HDDs. HDDs are going from commodity to tiny market niche.
My hard drive is already large enough, I just want it to last longer.
Hey, jackhole. Microwave ovens use 2.4GHz ergo it's a GODDAMNED MICROWAVE FREQUENCY. Take your "Well, actually" and shove it up your virgin asshole.