Seagate: New HDD Tech To Enable 100 TB HDDs
Who doesn't want more storage?
Consistent capacity growth in hard disk drives (HDDs) has become something we take for granted. It isn’t so trivial if you think about the fact that there are in fact physical limits to how much data you can store on one disk and every now and then we are nearing a limit that can’t be topped anymore. The last limit was hit in 2005 and the next seems to be arriving in the 2013 – 2015 timeframe. However, a new technology breathes new life into HDDs. HAMR will bring massive storage growth and propel the industry far beyond 100 TB.
When Samsung announced its new 2 TB Spinpoint HDD last week and mentioned that it can now store 667 GB on one 3.5-inch disk, I remembered how far the current perpendicular recording technology has come since its launch in 2006. The first 3.5-inch PMR drive, Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.5, packed only 75 GB on one disk. Back then, the storage density of PMR disks was just over 100 GB/inch2 and the industry forecasted that PMR will reach about 1 TB/inch2 until it runs out of room.
It was a natural question to ask where the current Spinpoint drive stands. It turns out that it is over 700 Gb/inch2 already, while Seagate’s mass market drives have reached 541 Gb/inch2. At the current pace, it appears that the industry will run out of room in the not too distant future. So I called up Seagate to find out more.
Seagate SVP Mark Re told me that Seagate in fact believes that there will be just a few more PMR product generations and a new technology will be necessary within 3 to 5 years as PMR may reach its end just north of 1 Tb/inch2. Re said that the industry has a choice to transition to patterned media or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to decrease the distance between bits on the disk and increase the maximum areal density. Re declined to pinpoint the potential of HAMR exactly, but said that Seagate currently expects a soft limit to arrive at about 50 Tb/inch2. If the 3.5” HDD form factor survives, then we should see PMR to top out at about 5-6 TB per drive. With roughly 50x the potential of PMR, HAMR should lead the way beyond 100 TB drives and possibly into the region of 200 – 300 TB in the 2020 to 2025 time frame.
Given the fact that the first HDD stored 4.4 MB on 50 24-inch disks, this is a truly stunning prospect. Imagine the storage capabilities of a 100 TB drive. 250,000,000 average MP3 songs or 250,000,000 12 MP photographs. Or 2000 completely filled Blu-ray discs or hundreds of 3D movies. While data volumes of content will continue to evolve, HDD capacity will evolve as well and it is reasonable to expect that single HDDs will be able to store the digital lives of multiple generations of a family. And even if the end of HAMR is reached, Seagate expects HDD technology to continue to evolve. Beyond HAMR, Seagate believes that patterned media will emerge and enable further capacity increases. If the current trend continues, then we should HDDs to remain with us as an affordable mass storage technology well beyond 2025. Flash will not be able to touch the value proposition HDDs in terms of price, capacity and performance, Re said.
According to the executive, Seagate has built HAMR prototype drives already, but the technology is not yet at a point where it could be commercialized. In fact, while HAMR is derived from a technology called “optical assisted magnetic recording” that was developed by Quinta, a company Seagate acquired in 1998, HAMR is a much more evolutionary approach. In contrast to Quinta’s optical read/write head, HAMR will use a traditional read/write head. The change to current HDD technology will be somewhat moderate, but also require companies to change the surface coating of the disks. Instead of a cobalt material, HAMR will use iron-platinum.
What will remain the same is the reliability of HDDs. Despite the massive increase of storage capacity that may be frightening to some users, given the amount of data that could be lost, Re said that there will be no major changes from today’s technology. The company will continue to drive reliability innovation through software and make backups easier.
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Lots of good this does with every major broadband provider toying with the idea of bandwith caps :-) Now you'll have tons of hard drive space, and no way to fill it.
SSD's will win the race. Not some mechanical solution.
In years Ill be able to afford SSd.
In 3 years**
Lots of good this does with every major broadband provider toying with the idea of bandwith caps :-) Now you'll have tons of hard drive space, and no way to fill it.
not if you pirate alot of movies of games
So in other words, every other drive may still be DOA.
10 to 15 = 3 ?
I guess it would depend on how that sentence is sectioned...
With roughly 50x the potential of PMR, HAMR should lead the way beyond 100 TB drives (and possibly into the region of 200 – 300 TB in the 2020 to 2025 time frame).
would allow the title to be correct
With roughly 50x the potential of PMR, HAMR should lead the way beyond 100 TB drives (and possibly into the region of 200 – 300 TB) in the 2020 to 2025 time frame.
would make it a wrong title.
Curse you, ambiguous English language!
Nobody needs that space. They should focus on other things, we can keep 1TB HDDs through 2020. Why collect 250,000,000,000,000 MP3s. This is so dumb,
xerroz, only if you copy the physical media. If not then you prove his/her point.
As for SSD replacing mechanical drives? I doubt this will happen until storage capacities, pricing, and reliability fall in line with the mechanical drives. Until then it is worth investing in non-ssd solutions.
SSD's will win the race. Not some mechanical solution.
Not without a massive increase is capacity and a drop in price.
Thats alot of porn.
Well this would be usefull for your own Blu-ray rips. You would not have to find your blu-ray disk among the 200-300 disk collection. You just start you video streamer NAS with 300TB raid 5 capacity and watch what you want...
... it just happen to be illegal to rip you own Blu-Ray disks...
We need some sort of system that would allow at least that!
That my friend is true in the united states and Australia and Canada but
something is going to have to change the only reason they can get away with it now is because people don't have a choice to shop elsewhere like with other products or services. Bandwidth costs have dropped for providers over 20% every year for the last 5 years so when they complain the bandwidth is costing them to much and that you should be capped or charges per bandwidth use they are BOLD OUT RIGHT Lying!
As a side note... we need much more competition in SSD market. There seems to be too few produsers at this moment... Yeah there are many companies as a brand name, but really few who actually make those memory chips for those SSD's we have. It is allmost a monopoly...
But so far so good, the price of SDD has come down, but maybe not as fast as we have hoped it will do...
Nobody needs that space. They should focus on other things, we can keep 1TB HDDs through 2020. Why collect 250,000,000,000,000 MP3s. This is so dumb,
The point is not to store a crap ton of MP3 files, just a comparison since that's a popular way to advertise storage devices on the market right now. Even if most consumers are using SSD by then this magnitude of storage capacity is very meaningful for the scientific and research communities. Hopefully Seagate and others are able to deliver what they estimate.
I always thought the idea of having an external 1TB drive filled with porn would be just a funny thing to have and say to your friends... "hey look, this is a TB of porn" as you hold it in front of their faces. But now, imagine being able to say that with 100TB! The potential to terrify/intrigue people is endless.
Ehhh this is all great and everything, but unless there is a drive that is currently half what they are saying, then three years is unrealistic even in a prototype stage. I believe in the phrase "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched." Remember in 2001 we were promised 10Ghz single core CPU's and that didn't happen. It is still possible but not with the standards we are accustomed to, we would have massive power hungry processors with huge heat issues if that were the case.
Given HDD manufactures records we will see a slow pace of doubling once we hit 4TB. 3TB drives are expected at the end of this year with 4TB by the end of next. That is already a year down. The highest I see in 3 years if that actually happens on time would be between 12-20TB's give or take. Of course they have plenty of technology designs to pursue unlike microprocessors, but the pace has definitely slowed since we hit 1TB. Once High Definition becomes more mainstream that will be the ultimate app that pushes forth consumer DEMAND for bigger hard drives and more space. My question is, how are SSD's going to fare. Right now they are taking this lag in the physical sector to build up their capacities, perfect their designs, improve their memory chips, and lower prices to build up a solid consumer base. I definitely see Hard Drive Wars back again in the next 3 years as the CPU Wars are sure to pick up next year.
I ask one thing, can we have more than 4GB dimms pl0x? I would greatly love to take advantage of the 192GB limit of Windows (even if yeah yeah we don't need it). Its been forever since memory has competed with anything other than faster clock speeds (usually just overclocked by manufactures). Now that people are starting to move to 64 bit OS'es this may actually happen. Oh things should get interesting in 3 years.
That is a lot of 2TB partitions
I would be happy to keep my 750GB hard drive, just make it 10 times as reliable and 10 times as fast. And I want my cpu to be at least 10 times as fast too.
The easiest solution to this would be to increase compression on everything thus making total space almost irrelevant. With that then they could do more research in the field of bus speeds, the true bottleneck of disk drives...
[/shrug]
If I give a man a 1TB Hdd..he can view porn for a day.
But If I give a man a 100T Hdd...he can view porn for a life time.
I don't see it getting that high so quickly. I bet in 3 years, we'll be have the max capacity around 20-30TB.
OMG..... Iron-platnium? I can see the price sky-rocketing now.
The multi-platter drives will be wonderful for servers. With this kind of storage density, you could have a single mini platter drive in your desktop or laptop. Something so small you could just plug it directing into a powered SATA port on your MB without needing a cable. By those figures, you'd still have many TBs of space on something that small.
I always thought the idea of having an external 1TB drive filled with porn would be just a funny thing to have and say to your friends... "hey look, this is a TB of porn" as you hold it in front of their faces.
I hope to reach that level by 2012. I'm a little over 200GB right now, but with everything going HD and 12+ megapixel, it's taking up more and more space!
Nobody needs that space. They should focus on other things, we can keep 1TB HDDs through 2020. Why collect 250,000,000,000,000 MP3s. This is so dumb,
Who's this "we"? 1TB drives are in no way huge. Very easy to hit this cap. Some people actually "use" their computers for something other than email.
Does the internet (and providers prices) will allow us moving so many data?
I'm still not able to fill my hotmail account after 10 years (just few Gb).
My 600Gb drive is empty at 50%.
So for sure I don't care about 100TB.
For sure facebook and other sites will love this!
I'd love this, as I do a lot of HD recording. But unless battery technology catches up, so my camcorder can record in HD longer, it's not that useful to me. It's only video that will take up significant hard disk space.
I cant wait! At least until it comes time to do a backup... ::shudder::
In years Ill be able to afford SSd.
Unless they just keep upping the capacity then new SSDs will stay at this current price and just keep getting bigger. Of course there are always cheap Asian markets as well as the second-hand one =)
In years Ill be able to afford SSd.
Pssshh $165 for a 80GB Intel G2 on ebay. Stop waiting, get one, and move on.