18 TB HDDs: Toshiba Collaborates with Showa Denko for MAMR HDDs
Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) announced on Thursday that it had completed the development of its microwave assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) platters for next-gen hard drives. The company is set to ship platters to Toshiba, which plans to start sampling of its new 18 TB nearline HDDs later this year. In addition to MAMR media, Showa also plans to release disks based on the heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology in the future.
The new 3.5-inch platters from SDK feature a 2 TB capacity and a new magnetic recording layer whose coercivity can be lowered using microwaves (see our brief description of the MAMR technology). SDK is not specifying which magnetic alloy or substrate it's using for its 2 TB media, but according to Western Digital, both should be very similar to those used for today's platters based on the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. Which for Toshiba and its consumers means predictable pricing and reliability.
SDK says that Toshiba is set to use nine 2 TB platters for its 18 TB MAMR-based nearline HDDs, which will begin sampling later this year (and which will probably be commercially available in 2020).
Previously: Toshiba Will Adopt Western Digital's Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording Approach for Hard Drives
Related: Western Digital to Use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording to Produce 40 TB HDDs by 2025
Toshiba Announces the First 16 TB Hard Drive
Related Stories
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
Toshiba plans to boost its hard drive capacities by using Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording rather than Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. The company could use the technology to produce an ~18 terabyte hard drive:
Toshiba, like Western Digital, is going to use Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) to escape the inability of current PMR tech to go beyond 15-16TB disk drive capacity. [...] Seagate has chosen to [increase capacities] using heat (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording or HAMR). Proponents of the MAMR approach say HAMR stresses the disk surface and read:write heads rendering the disk unreliable in the long-term. Seagate disputes this and has demonstrated long life HAMR read:write heads.
Western Digital has chosen MAMR for its future technology and now we know Toshiba is doing the same.
[...] MAMR uses 20 - 40GHZ frequencies and the [Spin Torque Oscillator (STO)] bombards a bit area with a circular AC microwave field, lowering its coercivity and enabling the bit value to be written (magnetic polarity changed as desired.)
It is reckoned that MAMR could lead to 4Tbit/in2 areal densities, beyond the 700 to 1,000Gbit/in2 used currently, and leading to 40TB drives.
Related: Western Digital to Use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording to Produce 40 TB HDDs by 2025
Seagate to Stay the Course With HAMR HDDs, Plans 20 TB by 2020, ~50 TB Before 2025
Seagate Plans 36 TB HAMR HDDs by 2022, 48 TB by 2024
Seagate Starts to Test 16 TB HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) Hard Drives
Toshiba at CES 2019: World's First 16 TB TDMR HDD Debuts
Toshiba has announced the industry's first hard drive featuring a 16 TB capacity. The MG08-series HDDs are designed for nearline applications and use two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) technology, therefore offering consistent and predictable performance.
Toshiba's MG08 3.5-inch helium-filled hard drives rely on nine 1.7 TB PMR platters developed by Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) as well as 18 reader/writer TDMR heads designed by TDK. The HDD features a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 512 MB DRAM buffer, and a SATA 6 Gbps or SAS 12 Gbps interface (depending on the model).
[...] Toshiba's MG08 drives represent a number of industry firsts. First up, Toshiba is the only company in [the] world to use a nine-platter HDD design. It was necessary with its 14 TB hard drives as the company did not use TDMR back then (unlike Seagate). Secondly, the MG08 uses SDK's PMR platters featuring a 0.635 mm z-height, that's down from 0.8 mm disks usually used for eight-platter designs. Thirdly, it uses TDMR heads developed by TDK, which enabled Toshiba to use the said platters.
Related: Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018
Western Digital Announces a 15 TB Hard Drive for Data Centers
Seagate Starts to Test 16 TB HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) Hard Drives
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Saturday February 23 2019, @09:07PM (5 children)
I always tell myself "upgrade when 4x". Almost there....;-)
Thing is, what is the ratio of M2/SSD to spinning rust for a good system?
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Saturday February 23 2019, @09:24PM
Did you pick up a 5 TB drive and are now waiting for 20 TB? Yes, it is very close. But you might not like the initial prices and should factor in an extra year or so for consumer-oriented versions to appear.
1:0. Something I just recommended to somebody else.
Spinning rust should be in an external enclosure or NAS. A $100 1 TB SSD should be sufficient for holding most of your applications and small data. Maybe 2 TB if you are installing lots of 50 GB games. Videos and other large files should be on the spinning rust. Use off-site backups if you need them.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Farkus888 on Saturday February 23 2019, @09:28PM (2 children)
You definitely want to get NVMe instead of something on a SATA bus. SSD memory is faster that SATA III so all SATA SSD are roughly the same speed. NVMe are on the much faster PCIe bus. I just put a 1Tb crucial p1 in my laptop. It is 4x faster than any SATA drive despite being kind of middle of the road.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday February 24 2019, @06:38PM (1 child)
The big improvement over HDDs is the Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS).
High sequential read/write speeds are a nice bonus, but not as important as the order of magnitude increases in IOPS that you get from using an SSD. So I would use whatever is cheap rather than worry about getting 1-3 GB/s transfers using NVMe.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Sunday February 24 2019, @09:45PM
That depends on the workload. For standard /nerdy home user stuff it is worth it. Booting, shutting down, installing updates and installing VMs are all noticeably faster with a 2GBs NVMe than one that runs at 1GBs. Those speeds are 4x and 2x the fastest SATA drive. It does cost more but you will know where your money went.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Sunday February 24 2019, @09:38PM
1:1.
SSD for your system.
NAS with spinning disks for local backup.
Offsite backup service.
With offsite backup, I've simplified my NAS from a RAID to a single disk. It is cheaper and serves limited purpose: quick recovery of complete main system failure.