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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)
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.