from the still-life-in-spinning-rust dept.
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:32PM (2 children)
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
Would have been nice include this in the summary, but:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @04:53PM
It uses "The Force", ya know. Midichlorians rotating at 7200 RPM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:38PM (8 children)
Since they used the generic "Energy assisted" label, which includes Heat assisted or Microwave assisted, they've apparently been beaten by Seagate who's already shipping HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) drives.
Would be more interesting if these were MAMR drives and they were willing to come out and say that, which suggests their not and still trying to sound innovative when they're a year behind.
I wonder about emissions, do they need a fan? or radiation shielding?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:47PM (4 children)
The only innovations that matter are capacity, price, and speed. WD just announced a 20 TB drive, but that uses SMR which hurts speed. It looks like Seagate only has 16 TB HAMR so far, WD has 18 TB HAMR or MAMR.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday September 20 2019, @02:12AM (2 children)
Reliability also matters.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 20 2019, @09:48AM
Hey! There's no words to describe the thrill of loosing your data at high speed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @03:50AM
I use magnetic disks to provide more long term storage reliability than SSDs. I have some drives up to 30 years old that still have data on them, and while there has been degradation, with check-summing and a percentage set aside for parity/ecc/etc recovery data, all of those should be good for 30-40 years of storage so long as the magnetic poles don't wipe it, or the head/drive motors don't stick.
Most HDDs are still far more reliable than SSDs for cold storage, and have the potential for recovery beyond that, that SSDs simply lack.
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Friday September 20 2019, @04:17AM
SMR has quite a few problematic workloads but for serialized CoW the raw I/O speed is slightly higher that PMR on the same platform (which is not entirely surprising as there is a slight reduction in head movement).
For HAMR/MAMR at such high density I'm more interested to know with the projected/actual raw bandwidth is.
Going by the workload rating it doesn't look useful for 'generic' workloads given:
550 TB/annual @ 18 TB is 30 'drive writes' per *year* which is a relatively light workload @ 0.082 DWD or 1.5TB /day.
High density PMR / SMR drives run around 160MB/s (and up to ~200MB/s) which would give an estimated 13 TB/day.
With a workload rating of 1.5TB/day you only need to sustain 18MB/s which even an SMR 'crippled' drive an emulate on bad day.
My guess is that the xAMR lines can't sustain continuous writes, presumably due to the heat added to 'soften' the track during writes.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 19 2019, @10:28PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @11:26PM
Think you may want to go back and re-read the article.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @03:44AM
Beaten as in: got a headline first? When I buy something I'm generally happy if there are alternatives to choose from, and I couldn't care less which of the manufactureres managed to hit the market first with similar products. What makes it so relevant to you who was first?
(Score: 2) by progo on Friday September 20 2019, @01:51AM (1 child)
I'm reading this on my metal-assisted chair on my light-assisted display.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 20 2019, @09:53AM
Man, you are doing it soooo wrong.
You should read it on your display on your chair instead. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford