Wraith
Bettyswollocks
15TB HDD by Late 2015
Hi guys, it is I back again with a tiny bit of news for you, I jest of cause, grab a brew and a pew this is going to be a biggie! and also some science thrown in for good measure :lol:.
Some of you may have seen some news floating around about 15TB HDDs being available by the end of 2015... well it does in fact look as though this is going to happen, I didn't report on this 5 months ago as it was just "hear say" and I don't like adding to the already vast amounts of rumour and speculation online. But a recent demonstration and announcement at the Ceatec trade show in Japan by TDK (remember them? if not ask your dad)
Sorry
well they have shown off their new hard drive heads which support the Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology - well here at OC3D we don't do news all half baked like other so called "Review" sites, only giving you tiny insights and expecting you to understand what we're refering to, so here comes the science!
It was said earlier this year that Seagate had their doubts that we'd see such technology before 2017 and they expressed this by stating it on Wikipedia, but with TDK ready to go into full production mode I guess they must now eat their hats, all I can say is there are exciting times ahead on the storage front, there is no doubt these drives will be pricey but hell it's 15TB in one 3.5" unit, my thoughts on this are as follows, what about temps? surely being a hybrid optical/magnetic head it is going to generate some heat, also with the fast advancements in 3D-VNand and SSD capacities will it really appeal to the general user or enthusiast... do we really care that much about mechanical drives anymore? I know while I'd love a true SSD only machine I do like the reliability and piece of mind that a mechanical drive gives me.
So guys what are your thoughts?
Source: TDK, Wikipedia, IEICE, Ceatec Japan
Hi guys, it is I back again with a tiny bit of news for you, I jest of cause, grab a brew and a pew this is going to be a biggie! and also some science thrown in for good measure :lol:.
Some of you may have seen some news floating around about 15TB HDDs being available by the end of 2015... well it does in fact look as though this is going to happen, I didn't report on this 5 months ago as it was just "hear say" and I don't like adding to the already vast amounts of rumour and speculation online. But a recent demonstration and announcement at the Ceatec trade show in Japan by TDK (remember them? if not ask your dad)


well they have shown off their new hard drive heads which support the Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology - well here at OC3D we don't do news all half baked like other so called "Review" sites, only giving you tiny insights and expecting you to understand what we're refering to, so here comes the science!
Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is a technology that magnetically records data on high-stability media using laser thermal assistance to first heat the material. HAMR takes advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum alloy. These materials can store single bits in a much smaller area without being limited by the same superparamagnetic effect that limits the current technology used in hard disk storage. This is achieved by heating the materials before applying the changes in magnetic orientation.
Heat-assisted magnetic recording ("HAMR") is an evolutionary technology being developed to allow hard drives to grow in size without using either shingle magnetic recording (SMR) recording which is dense but has speed considerations for random write access, or helium-filled drives which rely on helium, a notoriously difficult gas to contain reliably. HAMR's development is prompted by the limitations of existing methods of increased data storage densities, due to magnetic instabilities at increasing smaller sizes. These had been held off for a number of years using perpendicular recording, but this too is believed to be reaching its limits as of around 2014, forcing development and use of new methods.
The limitation of perpendicular recording is often characterised by the competing requirements of Readability, Writeability and Stability commonly known as the Magnetic Recording Trilemma. HAMR is one technique proposed to break the trilemma and produce a workable solution. The problem is that to store data reliably for very small bit sizes the magnetic medium must be made of a material with a very high coercivity. At increasing areal densities, the size occupied by one bit is so small, and the coercivity required becomes so high, that the magnetic field able to be created for writing data cannot be made strong enough to permanently affect the data. In effect, a point exists at which it becomes impractical or impossible to make a working disk drive because magnetic writing activity is no longer viable.
Coercivity happens to be temperature dependent. If the temperature rises then the coercivity would be lower. HAMR uses this physical behavior to solve the problem. In HAMR, a small laser is used to temporarily spot-heat the tiny area being written to at any given time. When the temperature of the area being written is raised in this way above the Curie temperature, the magnetic medium effectively loses much of its coercivity, so a realistically achievable magnetic write field can write data to the medium. As only a tiny part of the disk is heated at a time, the heated part cools very quickly, and comparatively little power is needed.


It was said earlier this year that Seagate had their doubts that we'd see such technology before 2017 and they expressed this by stating it on Wikipedia, but with TDK ready to go into full production mode I guess they must now eat their hats, all I can say is there are exciting times ahead on the storage front, there is no doubt these drives will be pricey but hell it's 15TB in one 3.5" unit, my thoughts on this are as follows, what about temps? surely being a hybrid optical/magnetic head it is going to generate some heat, also with the fast advancements in 3D-VNand and SSD capacities will it really appeal to the general user or enthusiast... do we really care that much about mechanical drives anymore? I know while I'd love a true SSD only machine I do like the reliability and piece of mind that a mechanical drive gives me.
So guys what are your thoughts?
Source: TDK, Wikipedia, IEICE, Ceatec Japan
~Wraithguard~
Last edited: