SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the now-you-CAN-take-it-with-you? dept.
Seagate has launched the world's first 5 TB 2.5" hard disk drives (HDDs). However, they won't fit in most laptops:
The new Seagate BarraCuda 2.5" drives resemble the company's Mobile HDDs introduced earlier this year and use a similar set of technologies: motors with 5400 RPM spindle speed, platters based on [shingled magnetic recording (SMR)] technology with over 1300 Gb/in2 areal density, and multi-tier caching. The 3 TB, 4 TB and 5 TB BarraCuda 2.5" HDDs that come with a 15 mm z-height are designed for external storage solutions because virtually no laptop can accommodate drives of that thickness. Meanwhile, the 7 mm z-height drives (500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB) are aimed at mainstream laptops and SFF desktops that need a lot of storage space.
Seagate has also launched a 2 TB shingled solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) with 8 GB of NAND cache and a 128 MB DRAM cache buffer. The 1 TB and 500 GB versions also have 8 GB of NAND and 128 MB of DRAM. These are the first hybrid drives to use shingled magnetic recording.
Seagate press release (for "mobile warriors" only).
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:40PM
It's physics. We can not write at any higher density w/o worse comprises.
- Helium filled (get the read/write heads closer to the media and more stable)
- Heat assisted (probably requires a low duty cycle or a seriously problematic heat-sink for laptops): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-assisted_magnetic_recording [wikipedia.org]
- Bit patterned instead of film (Isolate the Fe to pre-positioned bits that can be more written/read individually): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterned_media [wikipedia.org]
So helium may get your 2TB to 2.4TB.
The 10-20% extra cost for .2TB isn't going to entice any sales.
Adding SMR may get you to 3TB, but the dramatic drop in write performance (treating it as a conventional drive) means that there has to be a large amount of effort put into re-architecting the storage sub-system and/or switching to log-structured file systems which all have different tradeoffs that nobody really seems happy with.
For SSDs in laptops the density limit is probably in the 16-32TB range today, the only limiting factor is really cost and the fabs to make it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:05PM
I haven't seen evidence that HAMR will create an extremely hot drive that will require some problematic heat-sink in laptops. We are talking about high temperatures focused by a laser on nanoscale areas on the disk platter. If anything kills HAMR, it will be the economics required to switch from PMR, while competition from SSDs "heats up".
Some SSDs run 10x hotter than other SSDs for whatever reasons.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]