New uwave MAMR HDD technology for mechanical HDD to give 40TB drives
 

Notice the fact that mechanical hard drives last longer than SSD, a fact that's undisputed. I ended up getting a SSD for my personal computers but I backup religiously. However, when SSDs fail, they fail fast, unlike SMART monitored HDDs which often give a day or week's warning.

RL

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41611802

While solid state drives are popular with home users, many large companies and web firms fill data centres with disks that depend on moving parts because, at high capacities, they are much cheaper and last longer. The drives store data on disks or platters that spin at high speed.

A disk with a data capacity of 40 terabytes would be able to hold more than 2,500 two-hour movies encoded at a standard resolution.

Western Digital said it could produce the big drives as it had found a way to increase the density of data recorded on a disk by using microwaves - a technique known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR). The company is the first to produce a disk that uses this technology.

An allied method that uses heat instead of microwaves was thought to be the best way to help HDDs grow in capacity but it is known to be an expensive and technically tricky way to boost data density. The resulting devices, whose platters must be regularly heated beyond 400C, can also suffer reliability problems.

Heat-assisted magnetic recording also requires changes in manufacturing plants and the materials used to make the magnetic platters that hold data. By contrast, MAMR requires far fewer changes to manufacturing and works with materials currently used to make HDDs.

In a statement, Western Digital said it had produced prototype MAMR drives this year, and would give engineering samples to key customers in 2018 and start volume production in 2019. By 2025, further refinement of the technology would push capacities past 40TB, it said.

It added that a novel method of boosting data capacities was needed as it was getting harder to squeeze more data into HDDs using existing techniques.

New uwave MAMR HDD technology for mechanical HDD to give 40TB drives
 

On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 23:19:40 -0700 (PDT), RayLopez99
wrote:


Notice the fact that mechanical hard drives last longer than SSD,
afact that's undisputed. I ended up getting a SSD for my personal
computers but I backup religiously. However, when SSDs fail, they
fail fast, unlike SMART monitored HDDs which often give a day or
week's warning.

--
Huh? Maybe in a server situation with incessant writing - desktop
usage and little foresight for redundancy -- eg change the swapfiles
to a small & dedicated partition from a plattered drive -- there's no
factuality or undisputableness in that. Depending on further usage
patterns, at least to me, that argument could be quite to the
contrary.


An allied method that uses heat instead of microwaves was thought to
be the best way to help HDDs grow in capacity but it is known to be an
expensive and technically tricky way to boost data density. The
resulting devices, whose platters must be regularly heated beyond
400C, can also suffer reliability problems.

--
400C ... That sure makes good press copy. (I'd no sooner finished
reading that article on BBC to notice you posted it.)

A bit alike a practicality beyond 4Ghz cores, or how many or how
efficiently, if any less pertinent, code optimization actually is,
(even the top model Ryzen is now "code optimized"), one might wonder
where curves and skews settle in for the long haul.

Surely, by now, an added weight for a less demanding, even less
important market segment, the individual and home-user "PC"
represents. As opposed to an enterprise industrial market, where a
40T HDD would make sense. (Everybody else, so it seems, is on Android
devices, hanging out a McDonalds, for their 20-minute limit on WiFi
connectivity time.)

Not that switching media types, personally having migrated forward
since small floppy drives, has had any repercussions, nor would I be
entirely delusional to suspect there's no way, as I swear on Mount
Olympus's lofty peaks, I could conceivably wrap these ears around a
40T disk and that much data.

I just can't see the efficiency in going the distance, not with how
and what quality data is to the WEB for non-industrial purposes;- nor
can I see, in a couple or more years for WD to pull its wonder rabbit
from the hat of technology, [what quality comprises to storage] in any
vast sense changing;- Nor, perhaps more pertinent, can I say I would
want it, especially, if it did;-- Certainly not with what software is,
aside from nowhere near a paradigm of comparative magnitudes,
liberally eclipsing an era of bloat, and, but of course, having
diligently made all the correct tippy-toe moves, so not to have
stepped upon more of types of purely malevolent or exploitive programs
at present being promulgated.

I did however read some dated stats for the U.S., nationally for a
comparative assay of world usage patterns to computer grid power
pulls;- which will pretty impressive, if WD can make a dent in that.