Huawei is reportedly developing a new archival storage system using magnet-electrical disks that will reduce power consumption by 90% compared to standard hard drives (HDDs). As reported by Blocks and Files, this new system will be released in the 2nd half of 2025 overseas (with a China-specific release date being potentially sooner).
“Huawei’s MED (magneto-electric disk) brings brand-new innovation against magnetic media. The first generation of MED will be as a big capacity disk. The rack capacity will be more than 10 PB and power consumption less than 2 KW. For the first generation of MED, we will position it mainly for archival storage. It will be released overseas about 2025H1," Dr Peter Zhou, Huawei's president of data storage, told Blocks and Files back in March.
This mysterious new storage medium appears to be brand new storage technology developed by Huawei. Blocks and Files suspects that these new magnet-electrical disks likely employ spinning disks and a read-write head just like hard drives, and take advantage of the magneto-electric effect in some way (which refers to the behavior of electricity with magnetism). However, Forbes reports that it was told that Huawei’s Magneto-electric disks use a combination of magnetic tape and flash memory.
Either way, we can't be sure how exactly Huawei’s new storage technology works. All we know for a fact is that it will utilize magnetism in some way to help store data onto a disk or some sort of material. Regardless, the performance implications are very intriguing.
Magnetic-electrical disks will reportedly feature 90% less power consumption compared to hard disk drives and 20% less power consumption than tape drives while having 2.5x the performance of tape drives. According to a screenshot of a Huawei presentation, Huawei says its Magneto electric disks only generate 71W per PB, while traditional HDDs generate 450W per PB — an 84% improvement in energy savings.
The first generation of magnet-electrical disks will be integrated into a rack-mount system featuring more than 10 PB (yes Petabytes) of capacity. A rack-mounted system will be comprised of multiple high-capacity disks featuring around 24TB of capacity. Power consumption of these rack mount systems is expected to be less than 2 kilowatts.
It will be interesting to see if this technology lives up to its performance projects. If Huawei’s can turn its new magnetic disk technology into a profitable business, we could see Western manufacturers reverse engineer Huawei's tech for use in other countries.
