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Western Digital Announces Energy-Assisted Hard Drives

posted by janrinok on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-life-in-spinning-rust dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14869/western-digital-announces-18-tb-eamr-hard-drive

Marking an important step in the development of next-generation hard drive technology, Western Digital has formally announced the company's first hard drives based on energy-assisted magnetic recording. Starting things off with capacities of 16 TB and 18 TB, the Ultrastar DC HC550 HDDs are designed to offer consistent performance at the highest (non-SMR) capacities yet. And, with commercial sales expected to start in 2020, WD is now in a position to become the first vendor in the industry to ship a next-generation EAMR hard drive.

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550 3.5-inch hard drive relies on the company's 6th Generation helium-filled HelioSeal platform with two key improvements: the platform features nine platters (both for 16 TB and 18 TB versions), and they using what WD is calling an energy-assisted magnetic recording technology (EAMR). The latter has enabled Western Digital to build 2 TB platters without using shingled magnetic recording (SMR).

Since we are dealing with a brand-new platform, the Ultrastar DC HC550 also includes several other innovations, such as a new mechanical design. Being enterprise hard drives, the new platform features a top and bottom attached motor (with a 7200 RPM spindle speed), top and bottom attached disk clamps, RVFF sensors, humidity sensors, and other ways to boost reliability and ensure consistent performance. Like other datacenter-grade hard drives, the Ultrastar DC HC550 HDDs are rated for a 550 TB/annual workload, a 2.5 million hours MTBF, and are covered by a five-year limited warranty.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:32PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:32PM (#896200)

    Not a single beep on what "energy-assisted" means in all that verbiage.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:51PM (#896205)

    Would have been nice include this in the summary, but:

    Western Digital, Seagate, and others have been looking at technologies based around temporarily altering the coercivity of the recording media, which is accomplished by applying (additional) energy to a platter while writing. The end result of these efforts has been the development of techniques such as heating the platters (HAMR) or using microwaves on them (MAMR), both of which allow a hard drive head to write smaller sectors. With their similar-yet-different underpinnings, this has lead to the catch-all term Energy-Assissted Magnetic Recording (EAMR) to describe these techniques.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @04:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @04:53PM (#896554)

    It uses "The Force", ya know. Midichlorians rotating at 7200 RPM.