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HOYA Starts to Build Next-Gen HDD Glass Substrate Production Facility
HOYA Corp., an optical glass maker from Japan, announced this week that it had started construction of its new production facility for hard drive platter glass substrates. These substrates could be used to make conventional 2.5-inch HDD platters as well as next-generation platters for hard drives that use energy-assisted magnetic recording technologies (HAMR, MAMR).
The manufacturing facility will cost HOYA around ¥30 billion ($270.5 million) and will start production at the beginning of 2020, according to a media report. Located in the Saysettha Development Zone (SDZ) in Laos, the factory will be HOYA's third plant that produces glass substrates for hard drives. Being the newest one, the facility will use the latest manufacturing equipment and technologies, so it will be ready to make the most advanced substrates that will then be used by makers of platters (e.g., Seagate, Showa Denko, Western Digital) to manufacture next-gen HDD media. HOYA's other substrate manufacturing capacities are located in Thailand, and Vietnam.
Nowadays glass substrates for HDD platters are mainly used to make media for 2.5-inch hard drives for laptops and datacenters. As sales of 2.5-inch HDDs for notebooks are dropping because of cheaper SSDs, demand for these platters and substrates is decreasing as well. In the meantime, the use of glass substrates and platters in 3.5-inch drives is gaining traction as makers of datacenter HDDs start to use them both for existing and next-gen hard drives that use energy-assisted recording technologies. Glass substrates have a number of advantages when compared to aluminum substrates: they are thinner, lighter, more rigid, they expand less than aluminum when heated, and they may be made flatter. In the end, they are [preferable] for next-gen high-capacity HDDs.
Previously: Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:00PM
I had a shiny new 'Deathstar' fail on me back in the day, the issue we had was down to a faulty firmware S.M.A.R.T implementation on the drive, disable S.M.A.R.T in the bios, no issues, enable it...exit one drive, stage left...
Small mercy, this failure was on the dev box and we were prepping the image for cloning onto the other 159 shiny new Deathstars we were about to upgrade our machines with, needless to say, after a bit of digging, then shouting down the phone, we returned the rest of the drives unused to the supplier as unfit for purpose.
As an asides, I kept the failed Deathstar and eventually got it operational again, upgraded the firmware, and used it for occasional non-critical temporary file storage and transfer up to the middle of last year when I retired my last non-SATA motherboard from active duty. It lasted 16 years with no issues (other than the obvious trust one). At some point it is due to have it's magnets harvested and then the remains terminated by getting hit repeatedly with a sledgehammer, It'll be interesting to see how well the coating on the platters has held up before I shatter them.