Wednesday, October 25th 2017
Seagate Ready with HAMR Technology Enabling 20TB HDDs by 2018
Hot on the heels of Western Digital's announcement of an MAMR breakthrough enabling 40 TB hard drives in the near future, rival Seagate announced a magnetic storage technology breakthrough of its own, dubbed HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording). This technology will enable the development of hard drives with over 20 terabytes (TB) unformatted capacity by the end of 2018, which is a faster ramp-up than WD's 2019 timeline for the first MAMR-based drives. The first Seagate HAMR-based HDDs will ship with capacities of 20 TB, with the company promising 40 TB drives by 2023, well ahead of the 2025 timeline for 40 TB drives promised by WD.
Seagate HAMR is a fundamentally different technology than Western Digital MAMR. While MAMR relies on a spin-torque oscillator to generate a microwave field that burns finer magnetized bits on the disk, thereby increasing areal densities to 40 Tb per square inch, Seagate HAMR uses an extremely fine laser to heat up the RW head, creating finer magnetized bits. The physical layer of each bit is heated and cooled within nanoseconds, and hence a HAMR RW head draws relatively lower amounts of power - up to 8W for a random-write operation (the most power-consuming operation for a drive). Seagate promises RW endurance of 2 PB.
Source:
ComputerBase.de
Seagate HAMR is a fundamentally different technology than Western Digital MAMR. While MAMR relies on a spin-torque oscillator to generate a microwave field that burns finer magnetized bits on the disk, thereby increasing areal densities to 40 Tb per square inch, Seagate HAMR uses an extremely fine laser to heat up the RW head, creating finer magnetized bits. The physical layer of each bit is heated and cooled within nanoseconds, and hence a HAMR RW head draws relatively lower amounts of power - up to 8W for a random-write operation (the most power-consuming operation for a drive). Seagate promises RW endurance of 2 PB.
17 Comments on Seagate Ready with HAMR Technology Enabling 20TB HDDs by 2018
The article seems to imply that HMAR 8W write consuption is linked to the RW head only, leaving the electronics and motors out of the calculation.
If I'm correct that's a lot of power for a single write operation on the head only.
The capacity could be higher but a datacenter will have to invest in passive and active cooling at this point.
The total footprint will be reduced but temp regulation costs will increase.
Imho I don't see what to store so much on those drives for home usage.
Game files can go into triple digit gigabytes.
Ten years ago 3TB was alot. These days it can evaporate very quickly.
EDIT: BTW, some fresh backblaze data.
You could say some consumer Seagate models have problems when you use them as Backblaze do (which consumers don't do), but note them 10TB disks.
Games size is rubbish. Why do need to store more than few titles that you actually play?
It reminds me some people packing shelves with VHS tapes... useless...
As for games... If you can put them on a drive all at once, again: why the hell not? I mean, if I was strapped for space, I make do. But I still tend to like having games to jump into periodically. Racing, Sports, some long open world titles, multiplayer FPS/RTS... These are all game genres that you don't need to play constantly and are simply fun to jump into once in awhile. At the rate game size is growing, it's easy to run out of space. Especially affordable SSDs.
If the usual tame 1-2TB are over your gaming needs then well... what in hell it is? Steam downloads run steady on max(for exception when the sale is on and everyone feeds Gaben with more money) - You can get back what you want in few minutes... and realistically knowing gamers who seldom install at least half of the games in their steam library and the list of completed games is even shorter... really you chose in between max 5 games, and that's not a lot space wise.
I understand that such space for work is needed and justifiable... but for home usage? Let's be honest...