Seagate Ready with HAMR Technology Enabling 20TB HDDs by 2018

[btarunr]

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.



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[Rehmanpa]

Awesome, wonder if I'll have to sell my whole pc to afford two of these (raid 1 is a must with high capacity drives).

 

[Boosnie]

As this analysis shows, current HDDs draw total ~10W read and ~8W write in sustained operation (1gb transfer).
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.

 

[Prima.Vera]

I wouldn't use Seagate even if I receive 1 HDD for free. If I would receive 4 for free, I would put them in a RAID5/10 array and do prays everyday for drives not to fail. Too soon I mean...

 

[StrayKAT]

Seagate also just came out with some new enterprise SSDs... would love to see some reviews on it here (one is a whopping 15tb..albeit slow).

 

[RejZoR]

I really don't see this as a good idea. Adding even more parts that can fail to an already large number of them. This really isn't going to improve reliability...

 

[Octavean]

I really don't see this as a good idea. Adding even more parts that can fail to an already large number of them. This really isn't going to improve reliability...

I wouldn't worry about just yet. These HAMR drives will likely bee too expensive for anything other then enterprise use or there abouts. So they probably be out of the typical consumer price range. If there is an inherent flaw in the tech it won't be you or me that will be finding it out.

 

[Ferrum Master]

I really don't see this as a good idea. Adding even more parts that can fail to an already large number of them. This really isn't going to improve reliability...

Don't you like barbecued fish? A lasered barracuda .

Imho I don't see what to store so much on those drives for home usage.

 

[Gasaraki]

Don't you like barbecued fish? A lasered barracuda .

Imho I don't see what to store so much on those drives for home usage.

4K p0rn. Or lots and lots of midget p0rn.

 

[RejZoR]

4K p0rn. Or lots and lots of midget p0rn.

4K midget porn is tiny. Pun intended.

 

[Franzen4Real]

I wouldn't use Seagate even if I receive 1 HDD for free. If I would receive 4 for free, I would put them in a RAID5/10 array and do prays everyday for drives not to fail. Too soon I mean...

Absolutely. There is no way whatsoever that I would trust Seagate with 1TB of data, let alone 20TB. And my 4 free would result in 4 new eBay auctions, pronto.

 

[StrayKAT]

I haven't had a Seagate since a PowerMac years ago. But I'm probably going to buy one of the 10/12 TB Barracudas. What's wrong with them?

 

[BluesFanUK]

Don't you like barbecued fish? A lasered barracuda .

Imho I don't see what to store so much on those drives for home usage.

4K media and high quality 1080 files an go into double digit gigabytes per file. (16GB+ for a high quality 4K video file).

Game files can go into triple digit gigabytes.

Ten years ago 3TB was alot. These days it can evaporate very quickly.

 

[Frick]

I haven't had a Seagate since a PowerMac years ago. But I'm probably going to buy one of the 10/12 TB Barracudas. What's wrong with them?

Nothing. Literally nothing. They had some drives that didn't like the way Backblaze used them, and then the Internet went bananananas with Seagate rage. People will also link you to Google papers, but those are yearsold by now.

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.

 

[StrayKAT]

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.

Seems like the same could be said for 12tb.. but it just came out.

 

[Ferrum Master]

4K media and high quality 1080 files an go into double digit gigabytes per file. (16GB+ for a high quality 4K video file).

Game files can go into triple digit gigabytes.

Ten years ago 3TB was alot. These days it can evaporate very quickly.

Oh hello. And where from you get those 4k files and why do you need to store them as a average home user??

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...

 

[StrayKAT]

Oh hello. And where from you get those 4k files and why do you need to store them as a average home user??

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 one of the rare fools who has a 4k Blu-Ray drive, I like discs. But many people love just using 4k files. You ask "why". You could just as easily ask "Why not?" This comes down to preference.

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.

 

[Ferrum Master]

As one of the rare fools who has a 4k Blu-Ray drive, I like discs. But many people love just using 4k files. You ask "why". You could just as easily ask "Why not?" This comes down to preference.

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.

Stocking up useless 4K content rubbish doesn't seem to be really usual among home users thus needing 40TB storage. Seconds... I really don't understand the need for it as long the internet is there... especially using services like Netflix etc...

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...