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posted by martyb on Thursday November 09 2017, @06:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the hammer-hamer-mamer-mammer dept.

Western Digital recently announced plans to use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) to build its next generation of hard disk drives instead of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). WD promised that initial drives will ship in 2019, with 40 terabyte drives available by 2025.

In response, Seagate has reiterated its plans to produce HAMR hard disk drives in the near future. The company says that its first HAMR drives will ship around 2018-2019 (40,000 have already been built and are being tested by leading customers), at capacities of 16 TB or more. From there, Seagate expects to develop drives storing around 50 TB "early next decade", and eventually drives with capacities of up to 100 TB by combining HAMR with bit-patterned media and two-dimensional magnetic recording (PDF):

HDD technology has become somewhat boring. Innovation has slowed, but that's largely because we've reached the limits of PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), which is the key underlying HDD recording technology. Over the last two years, we've seen a few interesting new technologies that let us cram more bits into the same old 3.5" HDD, such as SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). Unfortunately, the new tech comes with slower performance and often requires radical system changes if you want to unlock the full performance. That isn't worth the small capacity improvement unless you're deploying tens of thousands of HDDs.

[...] WD's MAMR relies largely upon proven technologies, which is a plus, but Seagate claimed that it's already producing the more exotic HAMR drives on the same production lines as its existing PMR-based drives. It also said that it has already built a strong supply chain for the new materials.

Both WD and Seagate have solid arguments for their chosen technologies, but the market will determine the winner. Both technologies will undoubtedly provide similar characteristics to today's HDDs, such as endurance, reliability, performance, and power specifications, so cost will be the true differentiator. As always, cheap and good enough will win. The HDD industry settled on PMR recording in 2005, and all three big vendors continue to use the same underlying technology. The move to two different technologies should make for a more exciting HDD future. Seagate plans to provide an update on its progress in early 2018.

Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Seagate HAMR Hard Drives Coming in a Year and a Half
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters


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  • (Score: 2) by letssee on Thursday November 09 2017, @02:30PM (4 children)

    by letssee (2537) on Thursday November 09 2017, @02:30PM (#594598)

    I'd imagine that copying data from one place of the drive to another would always be a lot faster when having at least 2 heads. I'm actually suprised we haven't seen the multiheaded disks very much.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday November 09 2017, @06:08PM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday November 09 2017, @06:08PM (#594737) Journal
    The models I've seen with two heads had them at fixed offsets, so moving one moved the other by the same amount (otherwise you need an extra arm, which adds a lot of complexity and needs a lot of space). Having two independent heads, one for reads and one for rights, and ensuring that they didn't interfere would probably be quite difficult.
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    • (Score: 2) by letssee on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:28AM (1 child)

      by letssee (2537) on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:28AM (#597623)

      I'd think 2 arms on opposite sides of the drive should work. But you are probably right, because if it was easy we would have seen them more often

      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:35AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:35AM (#597633) Journal
        Yes, I can see the potential speedup from doing that, but if you take a hard disk apart there really isn't much space for extra actuators to move another head. You could probably do it on 5.25" disks quite easily these days, especially if you used a 3.5" disk and put the motors for moving the heads on the outside, but the market for 5.25" disks is pretty small and I doubt anyone would pay enough for them for them to be worthwhile. The problem is that you wouldn't be doing much about worst-case latency (if neither head is in the right place, you'll need to move one, and even if you need to move it half the distance of a conventional drive it's still a few ms) and you'd only cut average-case latency in half. If anyone has a workload that's latency-critical enough to want to do this, they'd be better off buying SSDs with latency around 10-100 times lower.
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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday November 09 2017, @07:03PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday November 09 2017, @07:03PM (#594768)

    It would make sense to have two to four sets of heads per platter side, but that would make the drives a lot more expensive (closer to SSD prices) and drop the MTBF significantly (for full operation).
    I'm not sure how the mechanical aspects of moving three heads while one is writing would work. Some pretty tricky vibration to account for.