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, @05:26PM (2 children)
It could be an SSD.
Even if it spins, it could consist of a dozen 2.5" drives in a larger 5.25" box. Mechanical parts could be shared with laptop drives, or the box could even be a RAID enclosure that holds laptop drives.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @06:09PM
SSDs aren't limited to the shapes that HDDs have so we will see more stuff like this:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11702/intel-introduces-new-ruler-ssd-for-servers [anandtech.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 15 2019, @11:11PM
Even my lowly Core Duo - not Core _2_ Duo - Early 2006 MBP had PCIe storage.
It's a very narrow card with a card edge connector on one end. There's space to populate I think six chips. Wall the boards are the same no matter how much Flash you choose, your board will just be appropriately populated.
SATA, SAS, Storage over Ethernet, even Fiber Channel simply _cannot_ compete with plugging your bazillobytes right smack into your high-lane-count PCIexpress.
Thanks! I've been having a rough day today, but you just gave me a very happy smile.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]