WD (Western Digital) plans to create a 40 TB drive, but is that enough?
The amount of data increases at an enormous speed, which cannot be said about the volume of disks.
The main trump card of all manufacturers of hard drives has always been volume, because they could not boast the same performance as that of SSD drives. And now, the best of the best HDD manufacturers - the WD company - has revealed the latest technology, thanks to which the disk memory can reach a whopping 40TB!
Western Digital already has a huge market advantage and has gone far in terms of memory from its competitors - they recently introduced a new 14 terabyte disk filled with helium in order to reduce resistance on rotating plates. But thanks to the introduction of a new technology - microwave magnetic recording (MAMR) - by 2025 the company plans to reach a memory capacity of up to 40 terabytes. And prototypes promised by mid-2018.
MAMR technology allows you to encode data to disk using a completely new method. Seagate, WD’s main rival, is also working on a competitive product called HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording), which translates as heat-sensitive magnetic recording. We will leave explanations of the intricacies of methods and engineering processes for IT geeks, because the end user is only interested in one thing - when will he be able to buy this? And this should happen already in 2019, after a long 13 years of research and development. Yes, the MAMR method was invented in 2006 by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and improvements are still underway.
Hard drives, like semiconductors, obey the laws of physics and will not go anywhere from them. Every year, it becomes harder and harder to reduce the size of the device while trying to increase the amount of memory.
Representatives of Western Digital believe that MAMR technology will reduce the cost of storing one terabyte of data, which is another advantage over SSD drives. The cost of storing data on hard drives per 1 terabyte has always been much cheaper than on SSDs, because it is easier to store more data in the same place on the hard drive than in a flash memory chip. It is expected that MAMR and HAMR technologies will allow disk manufacturers to fill up to 4 terabits per square inch of disk plate, which significantly exceeds the characteristics of hard drives today - 1.1 terabits per square inch.
At the moment, there is a trend in the fact that the amount of data and information is increasing in such a progression that manufacturers of hard drives simply do not have time to increase the memory of devices to meet their needs by 100%.
According to research by the international research and consulting company IDC (by the way, it is sponsored by Seagate), by 2025 the global volume of all data will grow to 163 zetabytes (1 zetabyte = one trillion gigabytes). This is 10 times the amount of data generated in 2016, it was equal to only 16.1 zetabytes. Most of this data will come from Big Data and ongoing analytics, especially from the Internet of Things (IoT) resource, where touch sensors will collect gigabytes of data per second.
And the most interesting - the volume of this data is so enormous that many companies do not even use all the information. They dump their accumulated data into the so-called “data lakes”, which will be gradually processed later, and maybe no one will ever touch them at all. There are statistics that show that up to 90% of the data collected is not used at all. Nevertheless, they should be stored somewhere, and then the hard drive comes to the rescue.
Keep in mind that this applies only to BigData. Of course, users also generate a huge amount of data. BackBlaze, an Internet backup and storage developer, noted that its popularity began to rise sharply after it began to run statistics and report hard drive failures from different manufacturers.
Research has been done on hundreds of thousands of hard drives hosted in its own data centers. It is already known that BackBlaze made an order for a disk storage of 100 petabytes in size and already at the end of the fourth quarter of this year it is planned to commission this storage at full capacity. In addition, this company has plans for another major order for the first quarter of next year. And this is just one provider of online storage among dozens of others.
This is of course great news for Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, and other hard drive manufacturers.
Original article: Western Digital plans 40TB drives, but it's still not enough
The main trump card of all manufacturers of hard drives has always been volume, because they could not boast the same performance as that of SSD drives. And now, the best of the best HDD manufacturers - the WD company - has revealed the latest technology, thanks to which the disk memory can reach a whopping 40TB!
Western Digital already has a huge market advantage and has gone far in terms of memory from its competitors - they recently introduced a new 14 terabyte disk filled with helium in order to reduce resistance on rotating plates. But thanks to the introduction of a new technology - microwave magnetic recording (MAMR) - by 2025 the company plans to reach a memory capacity of up to 40 terabytes. And prototypes promised by mid-2018.
MAMR technology allows you to encode data to disk using a completely new method. Seagate, WD’s main rival, is also working on a competitive product called HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording), which translates as heat-sensitive magnetic recording. We will leave explanations of the intricacies of methods and engineering processes for IT geeks, because the end user is only interested in one thing - when will he be able to buy this? And this should happen already in 2019, after a long 13 years of research and development. Yes, the MAMR method was invented in 2006 by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and improvements are still underway.
Hard drive physics
Hard drives, like semiconductors, obey the laws of physics and will not go anywhere from them. Every year, it becomes harder and harder to reduce the size of the device while trying to increase the amount of memory.
Representatives of Western Digital believe that MAMR technology will reduce the cost of storing one terabyte of data, which is another advantage over SSD drives. The cost of storing data on hard drives per 1 terabyte has always been much cheaper than on SSDs, because it is easier to store more data in the same place on the hard drive than in a flash memory chip. It is expected that MAMR and HAMR technologies will allow disk manufacturers to fill up to 4 terabits per square inch of disk plate, which significantly exceeds the characteristics of hard drives today - 1.1 terabits per square inch.
Hard drive memory is not keeping up with data volumes
At the moment, there is a trend in the fact that the amount of data and information is increasing in such a progression that manufacturers of hard drives simply do not have time to increase the memory of devices to meet their needs by 100%.
According to research by the international research and consulting company IDC (by the way, it is sponsored by Seagate), by 2025 the global volume of all data will grow to 163 zetabytes (1 zetabyte = one trillion gigabytes). This is 10 times the amount of data generated in 2016, it was equal to only 16.1 zetabytes. Most of this data will come from Big Data and ongoing analytics, especially from the Internet of Things (IoT) resource, where touch sensors will collect gigabytes of data per second.
And the most interesting - the volume of this data is so enormous that many companies do not even use all the information. They dump their accumulated data into the so-called “data lakes”, which will be gradually processed later, and maybe no one will ever touch them at all. There are statistics that show that up to 90% of the data collected is not used at all. Nevertheless, they should be stored somewhere, and then the hard drive comes to the rescue.
Keep in mind that this applies only to BigData. Of course, users also generate a huge amount of data. BackBlaze, an Internet backup and storage developer, noted that its popularity began to rise sharply after it began to run statistics and report hard drive failures from different manufacturers.
Research has been done on hundreds of thousands of hard drives hosted in its own data centers. It is already known that BackBlaze made an order for a disk storage of 100 petabytes in size and already at the end of the fourth quarter of this year it is planned to commission this storage at full capacity. In addition, this company has plans for another major order for the first quarter of next year. And this is just one provider of online storage among dozens of others.
This is of course great news for Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, and other hard drive manufacturers.
Original article: Western Digital plans 40TB drives, but it's still not enough