Huawei's new magneto-electrical disks promise 90% lower power consumption than HDDs, ability to store tons of archival data

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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.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • gg83
    The day may come but I'm doubtful the West will ever need to reverse engineer any tech from China. It would be reverse engineering a reversed engineered technology. This whole thing, I doubt, is new technology. It probably just combines tapes and flash like was stated.
    Reply
  • coolitic
    The author was certainly aware about how controversial that last line would be when he wrote it.
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    Heavy on promises, scant on details. China is known for their reliability and innovation in the storage space? Perhaps not yet...

    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.
    Lets dissect this a bit more, approximately 417 24TB drives is needed to achieve 10 PB, but lets round down to 400 as storage marketers never treat storage at the proper 1024 bits per KB but always 100024TB HDD WD drive consumes 6.8W active and 5.5W at idle (At spin down sleep I would expect it to be sub 0.5W).

    The storage space needs innovation and new products to displace the hegemony of DDR/NAND/HDD/Tape. There's $billions (USD) of revenue for the taking in the HDD segment, Tape segment marked less$5 billion].

    China bring it if you got it, but you will need to bring 10+ exabytes to disrupt the current ≈200+exabytes that WDD and seagate put out there each quarter. Tape storage seems to only do around 40 Exabytes of shipment each quarter. There is room for another player if you can make it reliable, performant, and cheap enough.
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    coolitic said:
    The author was certainly aware about how controversial that last line would be when he wrote it.
    IF they are successful, which is a giant if, others will certainly follow their path of innovation and replicate it, not just the west but the east as well... I don't see anything controversial with the statement
    Last Sentence for context:
    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.
    Success in storage is hard, especially for disruptive technology, regardless of origins. Look at Optane which was based off Stan Ovshinsky pioneering work in amorphous materials from the 1960s(See figure 3), it took 60+ years to micronize/productize and even the full force of Micron and Intel were unable to break in and create a profitable business. Still waiting for the next emergent memory tech, if successful you can bet competitors will follow from all around the globe, but the chance of success/barrier to entry is enormous.

    Good luck to all trying to break up this very entrenched and established market!
    Reply
  • targetdrone
    It's probably a Frankenthingy putting a nvme cache drive in a LTO cartridge.
    Reply
  • Dragonwatcher
    What they don't detail is the power cost of the chips that will transfer all the data that each unit holds back to the Chinese government for their use to either spam you or to steal your plans/ideas or worse you identity. Do not forget Huawei is on the restricted company list for the United States Government for the very reason that their hardware has baked in spyware.
    Reply