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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.
I store all my data on a 2 TB NAS, with plenty of headroom. I really can't think of too many ways I could take advantage of a 20 TB HDD. I'm guessing the market for this stuff will be mostly the people who are collecting and storing data ON you, not FOR you.
Maybe you should call them and point this out.
I don't like to think of them fumbling in the dark, wasting time trying to make these drives without really knowing what they're doing.
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People on Slashdot have been posting the equivalent of "640k should be enough for anybody" for decades now.
Something always comes along to fill that space. For a while I thought streaming/cloud might slow it down as people stop keeping stuff locally, but no it's carried on growing as fast as the R&D can manage.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Simple answer: Always keep more than one backup.
Backup yesterday's drives onto today's bigger drives and keep both generations around. Repeat every couple of years or so, discarding the grandparents. This way your total storage keeps growing to keep up with your accumulated data and you always have two copies of it around in case a drive dies.
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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.
You are 100% accurate. My take however, is slightly different.
As Spindle Drives increase their density(and capacity) so will SSD technology. And based on my subjective (not empirical) opinion, should be able to more than keep up with Spindle Tech.
The issue is that as these competing forces work, eventually one will win out. We are already starting to see how this is playing out, and it doesn't look good for spinning drives. One of the reasons is that there is a bunch of competing but related techs being hammered out in just the Solid State arena. So in addition to competing with Spinning drives, Solid State tech is competing with itself.
Does this mean that spinning drives are going away completely? Not any time in the next 5 years. There will be a steady decline in use, but I'm fairly certain that Spinning drives will go the way of tapes (which still exist somewhere). They are too old, too bulky, too slow, too much anything to be useful in the very long run.
I am 100% sure that there are use cases today for Cheap Dense Slow Storage. Mostly for long term /archival storage. Anything that needs access to a processor will want / require Solid State.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
My 8TB NAS is filling up (3 4TB drives in RAID-5). When we were thinking of building an entertainment center in our weird TV space, we realized that it was mostly for storing our DVDs, and it was cheaper to build a file server in the basement instead. Now we're starting to collect Blu-Rays, which I haven't ripped because I want to keep the full menus and special features, but I don't have a good works-on-Linux system for that yet. (The best suggestion so far has been to do a raw copy of the disc and then run a Windows VM as a player, but I want something far less clunky.)
This is kind of hard to follow, but I agree with your initial point. The reason these guys are trying to sell platters is that they have factories which make platters.
It's gonna be way cheaper in a decade to just do it all solid-state, but until that time, they're going to milk their investment.
That's a fair analysis.
If the demand for mass archival storage drops too low, then the drive manufacturers won't be able to amortize development costs over enough units, and prices will go up. That's the scenario that will most likely be the final death of spinning drives, as it will lead to solid state mass storage being cheaper.
While this is likely to be a slow process, I remember when memory prices had wild swings, and it's possible we may see the same with solid-state memory in the coming years. An sudden drop in SSD prices could kill the hard drive market overnight.
The advantage of 2TB drives is you can back up everything, twice. And you don't have to waste time sorting out the bits you really need to keep/archive, just do the whole lot.
Someone posted a break-down of the cost/benefit ratio once. As I recall there was a photographer who had a fair amount of photos to store, and it was suggested he sort out the good ones and discard the rest. Turns out that paying someone minimum wage to do that was far more expensive than just adding more and more storage to keep it all.
If you are only dealing with 1TB/year you could easily do an rsync type backup off-site too. 1TB of cloud storage costs next to nothing, or set up your own storage server at another office etc.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I would have to say that HDDs are far more reliable than SSDs and probably why they will be in the enterprise a bit longer.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Firstly, Bluetooth isn't microwave, it's UHF. Secondly, Bluetooth is about as precise as a candle. "Precise" in this context means "aimed such that the peak of the wave hits a handful of atoms, or even a single atom through the interference of multiple waves," not "modulated" (though it also has to be modulated, that's stupid simple to do.) What is hard to control with microwaves is a precise amplitude, precise frequency, and precise phase modulation at the same time - all of which are required to use microwave-stimulated magnetic hysteresis changes to materials in preparation for write operations. Honestly curious how you had the self-esteem to speak so incompetently though, guess that's probably why you decided to post as an AC.
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.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Or in the case of hard disks, a few terabytes.
Or, "640K ought to be enough for anybody, for a sufficiently large value of K."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Sony and Panasonic are the only ones working on it with a goal of shipping products, as far as I can tell. They've got Archival Disc, which is an extension of BluRay, which currently holds 300GB per disc (two sides, each with three layers, 100GB per layer), with plans for up to 1TB per disc on the roadmap. It's basically an extension of BDXL.
They missed their key ship dates, and at present the discs are only commercially available inside of Sony's Optical Disc Archive format, which is basically a cartridge containing many double-sided discs. Current capacities top out at 1.5TB for read/write cartridges, and 3.3TB for write-once cartridges.
I am 100% sure that there are use cases today for Cheap Dense Slow Storage. Mostly for long term /archival storage. Anything that needs access to a processor will want / require Solid State.
Systems and applications that require really fast storage will require DRAM. Flash is way too slow compared to DRAM. On the other hand, many data centers are extremely cost sensitive. These data centers account for many tens (hundred?) of millions of annual HDD unit sales. Many large internet companies require massive cold storage, i.e., data that is needed maybe a few times a year or less but which need to be retrieved in a few seconds when needed (e.g., think about the tail end of the distribution for Facebook browsing or Google search queries). For cold storage, flash is too expensive, and tape is too slow.
Even though flash prices have been dropping rapidly, they still have not gotten close to HDD prices. As a point of comparison, take a look at average price charts for various capacities of HDDs and SSD. Based on this webpage, the average large-capacity SSD price is around $250/TB, while the average large-capacity HDD price is around $40/TB. This roughly 5x price difference has held steady for many years. More importantly, HDDs have held this price advantage in the last decade without the usual historical once-per-decade technology disruptor. PMR was the last mini-disruptor ten years ago. HAMR/MAMR/bit-pattern has been promised for a very long time, and the price difference relative to flash will only increase when these new disruptors are commercially ready.
Yes, there is. Kodi handles it natively. You can also configure it to go straight to the main feature, but be able to call up the menu as or where desired. MKV format is rather handy for this sort of thing over ISO. I like keeping all of the different audio tracks, subtitles, etc in one file rather than a bunch of them.
MakeMKV for ripping.
I also use Media Center Master to rename the files, metadata tag them from a couple of sources (IMDB being primary), download artwork, etc. It makes using kodi actually pretty handy. Including some weird niche requirements. Say, finding all movies from the 80's for "Bad 80's Movies Night". Or being able to sort for the worst movies in my collection.
I do actually buy DVDs rather than torrent. $1 movie bins make for cheap entertainment.
Or a spinning drive where a head hits the platter, on a sweep. No real difference - just assume all failures are total bricks, and be done with it. If you don't, your backup strategy has already failed, the only question is how much has it failed: 90 or 100 per cent?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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!”
I have noticed that SSDs fail a lot less than HDDs... but when they fail, they fail hard. However, since the beginning of time in computers, one always was supposed to have backups and never trust that they could ever get their data back from spinning rust. SSDs only drive this point home. Once the electrons are out of the gates, there is no going back.