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Toshiba is sampling a 9-platter, 14 terabyte hard disk drive that uses "conventional magnetic recording", aka the traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) with no shingling:
The new series comes with both 14TB and 12TB disks that wield nine and eight platters, respectively. Toshiba also becomes the only company with a nine-platter drive with 18 heads. Each platter packs 1.56TB of data storage.
Competing HDD vendors (WD and Seagate) have used helium designs for several years, so Toshiba has largely been considered late to adopting a helium design. Toshiba fills the 3.5" drives with helium instead of air and uses a laser sealing process to contain the gas. The helium reduces internal air turbulence from the spinning disk. In turn, it reduces vibration and provides power, performance, and reliability advantages. It also allows the company to use thinner platters, which facilitates the additional ninth platter.
While Toshiba may be the last HDD vendor to market with a helium HDD, the company did it in style. The MG078ACA, which carries a tongue-twisting name because it is destined for the data center, currently weighs in as the densest HDD on the market using conventional recording techniques. That represents a 40% increase in density over Toshiba's previous-gen 10TB models.
[...] Toshiba currently has 24% of the HDD market share according to Coughlin and Associates, which comes in third to Seagate (36%) and Western Digital (40%). The company has been surprisingly resilient and has clawed back market share over the last year. The addition of a class-leading 14TB model should help it gain even more market share over the coming year.
Both drives have a 5 year warranty.
1.8 TB 9th-generation PMR platters are possible and could be used in a 16 TB Toshiba HDD late next year. Will we see 2 TB per platter without the use of HAMR/MAMR or shingles? Combine that with 12 platters (using a glass substrate), and suddenly you can have a 24 TB HDD.
Also at AnandTech. Previous article.
Previously: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
Seagate Launches Consumer-Oriented 12 TB Drives
Western Digital to Use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording to Produce 40 TB HDDs by 2025
Western Digital Shipping 14 TB Helium-Filled Shingled Magnetic Recording Hard Drives
Seagate to Stay the Course With HAMR HDDs, Plans 20 TB by 2020, ~50 TB Before 2025
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Saturday December 09 2017, @09:48AM
Yes, I remember those too, although never had the pleasure of seeing a bigfoot drive myself (though I still have a couple of 4GB Quantum fireballs whirring away in a machine, those things just don't die). Always seemed like an elegant solution for the home PC because most cases had at least 2 5.25" slots, and usually only one was ever in use.
The problem of using bigger drives now is that many of these drives go into rackmount servers for "Cloud storage", "Big data" etc... and none of those systems have 5.25 inch bays, some don't even have 3.5", relying on 2.5" disks.
On the non enterprise side of things (which were the bigfoot drives original market), most people I know don't even have desktops, if they have a PC it is a laptop, but quite a few get by on nothing more than their phone and tablets. Some have an external 2.5" 1TB drive, or 3.5" 6TB drive for backups/media storage, and they are quite happy with the current sizes for their needs.
From a enterprise point of view, having one bigger drive with more capacity vs 3 smaller drives in some sort of RAID makes little sense. Not to mention making the platters larger will increase seek times, and also bring down the max rpm of the spindle (because the edges of the platters will be spinning much faster than the centre for a given speed compared to a smaller drive).
To retool everything for 5.25" drives (or the taller "full height" 3.5's of old) and basically break compatibility with existing infrastructure just to pack more data in a "disk drive" isn't worth it, especially as you don't get the redundancy of multiple disks and increased costs due to reduced economies of scale.