Toshiba just demonstrated its first drives that can store more than 30TB using HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) technologies — proof that there are still ways hard disk technology can compete against more modern solid-state drives.
The company achieved 32TB on a drive that used the former, while it managed to get 31TB with the latter. Toshiba issued a press release detailing this achievement and mentioned a planned test deployment of the drive next year.
Although most commercial and end-users would prefer the faster speeds of SSDs they are often far more expensive than HDDs, especially for larger capacities. That means individuals, entities, and corporations that store a lot of data will find mechanical technology far more economical than solid state drives. So, you’ll usually find these types of drives in advanced data centers or on large NAS systems.
For example, a 22TB Western Digital Gold hard drive will set you back $600, while an 8TB 2.5-inch Samsung SATA SSD costs more with its regular price of $849.99. Even when on sale, the 22TB HDD costs $459.99, while the latter costs $563. This means that the HDD costs around $27 per terabyte, while the SSD costs almost triple at a little over $70. You may say that the almost $50 price difference means nothing to big companies. But when you multiply this amount by the hundreds or thousands of drives a server uses, you’ll soon be saving real money.
The two technologies Toshiba used for its 30+TB drive, HAMR and MAMR, aren’t new developments. In fact, other companies have also launched drives using these technologies. Seagate, one of Toshiba’s biggest competitors, has already shipped samples of its 30TB+ HAMR HDDs to its server clients for testing in 2023, while Western Digital has reportedly been experimenting with MAMR tech in its 18 to 20TB HDDs since 2019.
With more and more services moving to the cloud each year, many data centers need to expand their storage capacities. 4K and 8K video is also likely playing a part in the growth of the demand for these massive hard drives, especially as more and more movies and videos are produced in such quality. That’s because a one-hour movie shot in full HD video only needs 1.4GB of storage while a one-hour 4K or 8K blockbuster averages 22 to 38GB.
Achieving 30TBs in a single hard drive will then be a massive space saver, especially as the next step down in the capacity ladder is just 24TB. Going up to 30TB from 24 means you get 25% more storage in the same size and, presumably, the same or almost similar power draw.
High capacity HDD competition
These developments will hopefully make data storage more affordable, keeping cloud services at a reasonable price. Here are some of the future HDD capacities we expect in the near future: Seagate said in 2023 that it has targeted 32TB and 40TB HDDs, while Western Digital announced in 2022 that it plans to hit 50TB in the coming years. Toshiba also expects to release a 40+TB hard drive by 2027. So, even though HDDs are getting rarer and rarer in the laptop and desktop PC spaces, HDD manufacturers are still going full steam ahead with their developments for servers and data centers.
