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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: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 09 2017, @02:00PM (1 child)
Vibrations and speed would be a problem. But it would sure be something to see a helium-filled 5.25" drive (which should be able to spin faster).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @12:36AM
why would vibration and speed be a problem with the same physical size and enclosure?
Those full height drives often were 3600rpm -- they were not tiny spinners. 15krpm drives were certainly not the class of drives those old 5.25" full height MFM/RLL and SCSI drives were capable of.
Seek times will always be a problem on a platter that wide. Think of records or laser discs. Even with a giant shiny disc read with a whopping laser... skipping chapters was about as time consuming as getting up to move the needle on the record, except with laser discs one merely needed to wait and marvel at how convenient technology had become while you waited.
CD-i, and then DVDs greatly reduced that delay and latency, often using buffering and caches to read ahead the table of contents and know right where to go. Data CDs were usually dependent on the speed the drive mechansim could spin and for the laser to track; then every time it'd have to try to figure out where stuff was. Some music players traced over the disk to find that out, but over time that info got recorded onto the disk as a header (I have to admit I am not entirely familiar with that part of ancient history).
anyway I set up a raid 5 of full height 3.5" scsi-2 wide drives; 30GB. For the era (late 90s/early aughts) read was fast, seek was not...