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
Related Stories
Western Digital has announced a 12 terabyte helium-filled hard disk drive, as well as an upcoming 14 TB shingled magnetic recording HDD. The 3.5" 12 TB drive contains a whopping eight 1.5 TB platters, and does not use shingling:
HGST's Ultrastar He12 HDDs use speedy PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology in tandem with eight platters to provide a beefy 12TB of capacity. The 7,200-RPM HDD provides solid performance measurements of 243 MiB/s of sustained sequential performance and 390/186 read/write IOPS at QD32. The helium-infused HelioSeal design allows the drive to scale to eight platters and provides a 2.5 million hour MTBF. [...] The hits don't stop at 12TB; the company also has a 14TB SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) HDD on its immediate roadmap.
WD also announced an Ultrastar 8TB SN200 SSD, and confirmed that it is working on QLC NAND SSDs that store four bits per cell. Micron also announced an 8 TB (7680 GB) SSD this week.
Also at The Register.
Seagate claims that it has had 12 terabyte hard disk drives "in the field" for "several quarters", and that 14 TB and 16 TB drives are coming soon. The company has a goal of producing 20 TB hard drives by 2020:
The enterprise is also moving en masse to speedy SSDs for high-performance workloads, which recently led the company to halt further development of 15K HDDs. Many analysts opine that 10K HDDs are next on the chopping block. In response, Seagate shifted its production might to more lucrative high-capacity enterprise HDDs, which now account for 37% of its revenue, to leverage the shrinking HDD price-per-GB advantage over SSDs. Seagate recently closed its Suzhou, China manufacturing plant to reduce manufacturing costs, but it simultaneously increased its investments in other facilities to address the challenges of moving from six platters per drive to eight. The net effects of its maneuverings total $300 million in savings per year.
Seagate is essentially retreating into the high-capacity segment, and the company announced that its new 12TB HDDs have already been shipping to key customers for several quarters. Seagate CEO Steve Luczoalso noted that the company would offer 16TB drives within the next 12 to 18 months. Seagate's new high-capacity offerings are destined for data centers, NAS, DVRs, and a booming surveillance market.
Also at Ars Technica and The Verge.
Previously: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Using a glass substrate instead of aluminum could allow 12 platters to be crammed into a 3.5" hard disk drive enclosure:
Even if many modern systems eschew classic hard drive storage designs in favor of solid state alternatives, there are still a number of companies working on improving the technology. One of those is Hoya, which is currently prototyping glass substrates for hard drive platters of the future which could enable the production of drives with as much as 20TB of storage space.
Hard drive platters are traditionally produced using aluminum substrates. While these substrates have enabled many modern advances in hard drive technology, glass substrates can be made with similar densities, but can be much thinner, leading to higher capacity storage drives. Hoya has already managed the creation of substrates as thin as 0.381mm, which is close to half the thickness of existing high-density drives.
In one cited example, an existing 12-terabyte drive from Western Digital was made up of eight platters. Hoya believes that by decreasing the thickness of the platters through its glass technology, it could fit as many as 12 inside a 3.5 inch hard drive casing. That would enable up to 18TB of storage space in a single drive (thanks Nikkei).
When that is blended with a technology known as "shingled magnetic recording," 20TB should be perfectly achievable.
Toshiba is reportedly planning to release a 14 TB helium-filled hard drive by the end of the year.
Also at Network World.
Seagate has launched three new 12 TB helium-filled hard disk drives containing eight perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters:
These are not the first 12TB drives in the market, as enterprise versions from both Seagate and Western Digital have been around for some time. However, Seagate is the first vendor to bring down the prices and ship 12TB drives in the consumer market.
From a hardware viewpoint, the three drives are similar to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v7 drives launched in March 2017. All of them features eight PMR platters with a 923 Gb/in2 areal density in a sealed enclosure filled with helium. That said, the Barracuda Pro Compute, meant for desktop use, doesn't come with rotational vibration (RV) sensors or dual-plane motor balancing hardware. The RV sensors and the dual-plane balance / AgileArray features enable reliable performance in multi-drive enclosures. The other important differentiation aspects include firmware features, warranty / workload ratings, and value-added services like the Seagate Rescue Data Recovery.
Two of the drives come with 5 year warranties.
Previously: HGST Announces 10 Terabyte PMR Hard Drive
AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018
Western Digital Begins Shipping 12 TB Helium-Filled Drives with 8 Platters
Seagate HAMR Hard Drives Coming in a Year and a Half
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
Western Digital is planning to use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) instead of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to produce hard drives with capacities of up to 40 terabytes by 2025:
WD has selected MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) as its new HDD recording technology, which the company claims can enable up to 40TB HDDs by 2025. WD's rapid transition to MAMR is somewhat surprising, but the technology has been in development for nearly a decade. It certainly stands in contrast to Seagate's plans for using the laser-assisted HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) as the route to higher storage density.
The transition to the new recording process isn't immediate, but WD plans to have initial products shipping by 2019, and it had working demo models this week at its event in San Jose. The improved recording technology is needed to keep HDDs cost-competitive with the surging SSDs, but economics dictate that SSDs will never replace HDDs entirely, especially as the volume of data continues to grow exponentially; WD predicts that HDDs will account for ~90% of data center storage in 2020.
The technology announcement reportedly took the storage industry by surprise and MAMR doesn't have the same issues that have delayed HAMR:
WD pointed out that MAMR requires absolutely no external heating of the media that could lead to reliability issues. The temperature profiles of MAMR HDDs (both platters and drive temperature itself) are expected to be similar to those of the current generation HDDs. It was indicated that the MAMR drives would meet all current data center reliability requirements.
Based on the description of the operation of MAMR, it is a no-brainer that HAMR has no future in its current form. Almost all hard drive industry players have a lot more patents on HAMR compared to MAMR. It remains to be seen if the intellectual property created on the HAMR side is put to use elsewhere.
Will we have 100 TB by 2032?
Also at BBC, PetaPixel, and Engadget. WD Technology Brief.
Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Seagate HAMR Hard Drives Coming in a Year and a Half
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
Western Digital is now shipping 14 TB hard drives. The products use shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which can slow down re-writes:
Western Digital has started to ship its new HGST Ultrastar Hs14 hard drives, promoted as being suitable for cloud datacenters and for hyperscale developments. The capacity increase from its predecessor, the Ultrastar Ha10, from 10TB to 14 TB offers a significant performance improvement. The new 14 TB HDD is based on shingled magnetic recording technology, which is a system that naturally focuses more on sequential write performance. These drives will only be available with host management, which means it will not be available to general consumers, but only to select customers of HGST.
The HGST Ultrastar Hs14 relies on Western Digital's fourth-generation HelioSeal enterprise platform which integrates eight platters and features various internal components specially designed for such hard drives. The new helium-filled HDD has a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 512 MB cache. and numerous enhancements when it comes to reliability and durability of the drive. As with other HGST enterprise-class HDDs, the Ultrastar Hs14 is rated for 2.5 million hours MTBF and comes with a five-year warranty.
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
Western Digital Begins Shipping 12 TB Helium-Filled Drives with 8 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 recently announced plans to use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) to build its next generation of hard disk drives instead of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). WD promised that initial drives will ship in 2019, with 40 terabyte drives available by 2025.
In response, Seagate has reiterated its plans to produce HAMR hard disk drives in the near future. The company says that its first HAMR drives will ship around 2018-2019 (40,000 have already been built and are being tested by leading customers), at capacities of 16 TB or more. From there, Seagate expects to develop drives storing around 50 TB "early next decade", and eventually drives with capacities of up to 100 TB by combining HAMR with bit-patterned media and two-dimensional magnetic recording (PDF):
HDD technology has become somewhat boring. Innovation has slowed, but that's largely because we've reached the limits of PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), which is the key underlying HDD recording technology. Over the last two years, we've seen a few interesting new technologies that let us cram more bits into the same old 3.5" HDD, such as SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). Unfortunately, the new tech comes with slower performance and often requires radical system changes if you want to unlock the full performance. That isn't worth the small capacity improvement unless you're deploying tens of thousands of HDDs.
[...] WD's MAMR relies largely upon proven technologies, which is a plus, but Seagate claimed that it's already producing the more exotic HAMR drives on the same production lines as its existing PMR-based drives. It also said that it has already built a strong supply chain for the new materials.
Both WD and Seagate have solid arguments for their chosen technologies, but the market will determine the winner. Both technologies will undoubtedly provide similar characteristics to today's HDDs, such as endurance, reliability, performance, and power specifications, so cost will be the true differentiator. As always, cheap and good enough will win. The HDD industry settled on PMR recording in 2005, and all three big vendors continue to use the same underlying technology. The move to two different technologies should make for a more exciting HDD future. Seagate plans to provide an update on its progress in early 2018.
Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Seagate HAMR Hard Drives Coming in a Year and a Half
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
Seagate has announced a 14 terabyte helium-filled hard drive that uses perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) rather than shingled magnetic recording (SMR). Toshiba announced a similar drive in December:
Seagate this week formally introduced its first hard drive with 14 TB capacity aimed at cloud datacenters that does not use shingled magnetic recording. The new Exos X14 HDDs are filed with helium and are based on the latest-generation PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) platters, running at 7200 RPM.
[...] The Exos X14 is Seagate's response to Toshiba's MG07ACA HDD with 14 TB capacity announced last year, although until we recieve further information, we cannot do a direct comparison. The major benefit of both drives is their increased capacity that enables datacenter operators to store 3360 TB of data per rack (compared to 2440 TB with 10 TB HDDs), which is a key advantage for companies that need to maximize their storage capacity per square meter and per watt, while meeting other TCO objectives. Another indisputable win of 14 TB hard disks from Seagate and Toshiba (vs. HGST's Ultrastar Hs14) is their conventional magnetic recording technology, which ensures predictable writing performance and permits drop in compatibility of the HDDs with existing storage applications.
The author guesses it will have nine ~1.55 TB platters, like Toshiba's version. 9th-generation and beyond PMR platters that can store 1.8 TB or more may be seen before the technology is phased out:
[November 2017's] top-of-the-range enterprise-class 3.5" HDDs from Seagate and Western Digital can store up to 12 TB of data. They are based on eight 8th generation PMR platters featuring ~1.5 TB capacities. Toshiba is a little bit behind its rivals with their 10 TB units featuring seven 8th gen platters with 1.43 TB capacity. With the arrival of the 9th gen PMR platters in 2018, hard drive makers will be able to increase the capacities of their eight-platter models to 14 TB, while designs with seven platters can go up to 12 TB.
Related: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
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
Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB HDD Review: Massive Storage for Desktops
The exponential increase in data storage requirements over the last decade or so has been handled by regular increases in hard drive capacities. Multiple HDD vendors supply them to cloud providers (who get the main benefits from advancements in hard drive technologies), but, Seagate is the only one to also focus on the home consumer / prosumer market. In the last three generations, we have seen that Seagate has been the first to target the desktop storage market with their highest capacity drives. The 10 TB BarraCuda Pro was released in Q3 2016, and the 12 TB version in Q4 2017. Seagate is launching the 14 TB version today.
The Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB is a 7200RPM SATAIII (6 Gbps) hard drive with a 256MB multi-segmented DRAM cache. It features eight PMR platters with a 1077 Gb/in2 areal density in a sealed enclosure filled with helium. The main change compared to the 12TB version introduced last year is the usage of two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) heads, allowing for higher areal density (1077 Gb/in2 vs. 923 Gb/in2 without TDMR).
Launch price is $580.
Western Digital has announced a 15 TB hard drive, beating the current crop of 14 TB drives before the release of 16 TB drives by itself or others (Seagate had planned to release a 16 TB drive by the end of 2018). The drive uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and is helium-filled:
Western Digital notes that its new 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD is the industry's highest capacity hard drive, and the company is aiming it at those who want to pack the most storage into as small a space as possible. The Ultrastar DC HC620 uses shingled magnetic recording to increase density, and while Western Digital notes that SMR requires some extra work on the part of the end user, that's worth it when it comes to overall cost per terabyte and total cost of ownership.
[...] Release date is another unknown at this point, too. Western Digital says that it's currently shipping qualification samples to some of its enterprise customers and that the HDD will become widely available later this quarter, but that's as specific as the company got with today's announcement.
Also at The Verge.
Related: 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
Western Digital Shipping 14 TB Helium-Filled Shingled Magnetic Recording Hard Drives
Toshiba Announces its Own Helium-Filled 12-14 TB Hard Drives, with "Conventional Magnetic Recording"
Seagate Announces a 14 TB Helium-Filled PMR Hard Drive
Seagate Launches 14 TB Hard Drive for Desktop Users
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 09 2017, @07:59AM (2 children)
Wikipedia says longitudinal recording was the traditional way and PMR started to be used in 2005.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 09 2017, @08:01AM (1 child)
Never mind, I guess the comparison was against HAMR and MAMR which are newer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 09 2017, @02:05PM
PMR [wikipedia.org] appeared on the market in 2005 and was supposed to have ended its run already. But it's still hanging in there. 1.8 TB per platter is in the bag, 2.0 TB might be possible.
HAMR [wikipedia.org] was supposed to become available around 2015-2016. It has been delayed several times and will now be competing against MAMR [soylentnews.org], basically the microwave version of HAMR.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 09 2017, @08:54AM (9 children)
I remember when hard drives used to be physically bigger, to go in a so-called 5.25-inch bay. The last was the Quantum Bigfoot. Before that some of them were "full height," the height of the floppy drives in the original IBM PC, which was like the height of two modern CD/DVD drives. In those days, if you had a 10 MB or 20 MB drive you were doing all right. With today's densities, a drive of that size could hold tens of terabytes.
(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.
(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Saturday December 09 2017, @09:57AM (1 child)
The problem with the Quantum Bigfoot drives was that they were SLOW. Very slow. Hideously slow.
I had a couple of them. Sequential transfer speeds were 'okay', but seek times were horrible and random access was a snorefest.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Sunday December 10 2017, @06:37AM
I'd still like one as cheap, large, and doesn't have to be particularly fast mass storage drive. There's no reason to use one for a boot/OS drive. We have SSDs for that.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 09 2017, @10:20AM (3 children)
I remember when the harddisks had swappable plates [auckland.ac.nz].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 09 2017, @05:22PM
Bernolli(sp?) boxes.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday December 12 2017, @08:35AM (1 child)
You know you are hardcore when you need a socket wrench to switch your hard disk platters :-)
Very cool, thanks for the share!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 12 2017, @09:37AM
I actually tried to run programs on a machine using those (uni time)
Input from punch cards, compile errors (or any output) on listing. After 2-3 cycles of 'Here's the Fortran program on this stack of cards' - one week later 'Here's the compile-error listing, go repunch the typos', I gave up and started to use a ZX Spectrum clone.
(The above just in case you acquire the taste for retrocomputing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(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...