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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the defrag-with-windex dept.

Using a glass substrate instead of aluminum could allow 12 platters to be crammed into a 3.5" hard disk drive enclosure:

Even if many modern systems eschew classic hard drive storage designs in favor of solid state alternatives, there are still a number of companies working on improving the technology. One of those is Hoya, which is currently prototyping glass substrates for hard drive platters of the future which could enable the production of drives with as much as 20TB of storage space.

Hard drive platters are traditionally produced using aluminum substrates. While these substrates have enabled many modern advances in hard drive technology, glass substrates can be made with similar densities, but can be much thinner, leading to higher capacity storage drives. Hoya has already managed the creation of substrates as thin as 0.381mm, which is close to half the thickness of existing high-density drives.

In one cited example, an existing 12-terabyte drive from Western Digital was made up of eight platters. Hoya believes that by decreasing the thickness of the platters through its glass technology, it could fit as many as 12 inside a 3.5 inch hard drive casing. That would enable up to 18TB of storage space in a single drive (thanks Nikkei).

When that is blended with a technology known as "shingled magnetic recording," 20TB should be perfectly achievable.

Toshiba is reportedly planning to release a 14 TB helium-filled hard drive by the end of the year.

Also at Network World.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:44AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:44AM (#567681) Journal

    Buy the new helium-filled hard drives. I'd like to see dust try and get in there.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday September 14 2017, @09:02AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday September 14 2017, @09:02AM (#567702) Journal
    Dust typically doesn't get in, it's more often already there as a result of failures in the clean room process during assembly, and becomes dislodged during operation. This is just as possible with helium-filled drives. Being sufficiently enclosed that dust can't get in is orders of magnitude easier than being helium-tight. You can see how quickly helium leaks out of a balloon by trying to light a helium balloon with a match: the escaping helium through the skin extinguishes the match - don't try this with a hydrogen balloon! No one (except very small children, for whom it is a tragedy) cares that a helium balloon goes flat in a few days, but when a hard drive depends on helium and not air being present for a multi-year operating lifetime, that's a really narrow design tolerance for the enclosure. Narrow design tolerances translate to new and exciting failure modes.
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