Seagate: 100TB HDDs Due in 2030, Multi-Actuator Drives to Become Common
Seagate is on track to deliver ~50TB hard disk drives by 2026, ~100TB HDDs by 2030, and 120TB+ units early next decade, according to the company's recently revealed product and technology roadmaps. To hit capacity targets, Seagate will have to adopt new magnetic recording technologies. To ensure the high performance of its future drives, the company plans to leverage its multi-actuator technology more broadly. This tech doubles the performance of its hard drives, and it could become a standard feature on some of the company's product lines.
[...] Today's [heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)] media is expected to enable drives featuring 80TB ~ 100TB capacity, according to developers. But, for 3.5-inch HDDs with a ~105TB capacity and 5 ~ 7Tb/in2 areal density, new ordered-granular magnetic films will be needed as grains will get very small and tracks will get very narrow. But ordered-granular media is expected to be a relatively short stop before 'fully' bit patterned media (BPM) technology comes into play with an 8Tb/inch2 areal density.
[...] A straightforward way to increase the [input/output operations per second (IOPS)]-per-TB performance of an HDD is to use more than one actuator with read/write heads, and this is exactly what Seagate is set to do. Using two actuators instead of one can almost double throughput as well as IOPS-per-TB performance, which is tremendously important for data centers. Furthermore, doubling the number of actuators also halves the time Seagate needs to test a drive before shipping, as it is faster to inspect eight or nine platters using two independent actuators, which lowers costs.
Previously: 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
Related: Toshiba Announces 16 TB and 18 TB Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) Hard Drives
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
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 HAMRs out a roadmap for future hard drive recording tech
Seagate has set a course to deliver a 48TB disk drive in 2023 using its HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, doubling areal density every 30 months, meaning 100TB could be possible by 2025/26.
[...] Seagate will introduce its first HAMR drives in 2020. The chart [here], from an A3 Tech Live event in London, shows Seagate started developing its HAMR tech in 2016 and that a 20TB+ drive will be rolled out in 2020.
The last PMR drive appears in 2019/20 with 16TB capacity. Seagate's current highest-capacity drive is a 14TB Exos 3.5-inch product.
There is a forecast of areal density doubling every 2.5 years, and Seagate shows two other HAMR drive capacity points: 36TB in 2021/22 and 48TB in 2023/24. Capacity goes on increasing beyond 2025, with 100TB looking likely.
The firm makes the point that HAMR drives will be drop-in replacements for current PMR drives. Seagate will actually develop performance-optimised HAMR drives with MACH.2 multi-actuator technology – two read/write heads per platter – and capacity-optimised drives with shingled magnetic recording (SMR). These are shown in a [second chart].
Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Seagate HAMR Hard Drives Coming in a Year and a Half
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
Toshiba Unveils World's First FC-MAMR HDD: 18 TB, Helium Filled
Toshiba this week announced the industry's first hard drive featuring flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology. The new MG09-series HDDs are designed primarily for nearline and enterprise applications, they offer an 18 TB capacity along with an ultra-low idle power consumption.
The Toshiba MG09-series 3.5-inch 18 TB HDD are based on the company's 3rd generation nine-platter helium sealed platform that features 18 heads with a microwave-emitting component which changes magnetic coercivity of the platters before writing data. The HD disks are made by Showa Denko K.K. (SDK), a long-time partner of Toshiba. Each aluminum platter is about 0.635 mm thick, it features an areal density of around 1.5 Tb/inch2 and can store up to 2 TB of data. The MG09 family also includes a 16 TB model which presumably features a lower number of platters (based on the same performance rating).
Previously:
Toshiba Will Adopt Western Digital's Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording Approach for Hard Drives
Toshiba Roadmap Includes Both MAMR and HAMR Hard Drives, as Well as TDMR and Shingles
Western Digital Releases New 18TB, 20TB EAMR Drives
![[here]](https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/11/02/seagate_why_hamr_950.jpg){kind=link}
![[second chart]](https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/11/02/seagate_hamr_roadmap_950.jpg){kind=link}
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Wednesday March 10 2021, @06:57AM (2 children)
Thats a lot of storage. I guess it makes sense in a data center. Not sure if I'd have much use for that in my home office. I like to hoard, but that's excessive.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 10 2021, @11:05AM
Hoarding 100 TB is no problem at all with enablers like these [reddit.com], and it's theoretically less than 2 weeks of download time over a 1 Gbps connection. By the time these drives actually come out, the amount a hoarder will want to store will have dramatically increased.
8K or 360-degree VR video could fill a drive relatively quickly, or with only days/hours of raw footage. Preserving large amounts of video in general is probably the most obvious thing most people could do to fill 100 TB, although if you have a reason to download astronomical data, it's done for (LSST will collect 20 terabytes per night).
HDD technology remains a crappy dead end other than the capacity. Rewritable holographic media or universal memory would be nice.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @03:31PM
A drive this size is really only useful to typical home users because it allows you to keep regular snapshots that you never have to delete for the purposes of recovering space. Space use is growing, but it doesn't seem to be growing as quickly as it has for most people. For most people, there's going to be a limited number of DVDs and the like that they want on their computer and chances are one of these drives would allow all of that to be accessible at once.
Pair two of them in a ZFS array and you'd have self-healing and snapshots back to the initial install with no need to delete any of them due to space limitations. Obviously, you'd still need offsite backups in case of theft or natural disaster, but it's unlikely that two or more drives will die at the same time.
(Score: 1) by vali.magni on Wednesday March 10 2021, @07:25AM (11 children)
As capacity increases I'm more concerned with errors (bit rot, etc.) and failure rates. Are there any projections around these parameters?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday March 10 2021, @08:12AM (10 children)
Every Seagate drive I've ever purchased has failed miserably way under the "MTBF" average.
That's from enterprise down to desktop, used sparingly or for things like CCTV, SAN RAID, offline NAS, server RAID, etc. etc.
In my current workplace, that's dozens of drives all failing with the first few years of having them.
I've yet to rebuild a RAID array successfully that was based on Seagate drives (and, sure, it could be said that you shouldn't build an array with all identical drives, but when you buy them new and they come populated with them, you'd expect them to hold out at least a couple of years of non-intensive usage). Every time, while rebuilding, I get a cascade of failures and the array is just trashed.
As I see them, I just replace them with something else (anything else!).
I honestly thought the days of "Yeah, but Brand X drives always fail" was left in the days of DOS, the IBM Deskstars, Maxtor etc. but no. Everything I've ever purchased or populated with Seagate drives, whether server, home NAS, small business NAS, desktop or storage modules for blade servers or SAN unit, has failed miserably. Replace the drives with the appropriate WD equivalent and they just keep spinning (two drive failures in 7 years versus 40/50 in the first year alone of Seagate).
That said... I'm far more interested in SSD nowadays. HDD is dead, but they keep trying to flog it. You can't keep increasing capacity (and thus backup, rebuild etc. times) without some increase in speed, but HDDs are pretty much where they're ever going to be in terms of speed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @09:06AM
The MTBF isn't the median of the distribution generated by the function. If the MTBF has been calculated correctly, around 36% of the product population will survive to that time. It also doesn't hold in situations without a CFR. It is not surprising you haven't had a single product survive to their MTBF, just as it isn't a surprise that many claim they haven't seen a failure yet.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @01:54PM (6 children)
SLC with its 100,000 rewrites had an implicit lifelong guarantee (and explicit too, in most cases).
MLC with 10,000 and slower but 2x space made sense in many places.
TLC with 3,000 and doubly slower, with 1.5x space of MLC? Hmm... maybe, for those thrifty souls out there.
QLC with 1,000 and yet again slower, with 1.3x space of TLC? Seriously?
PLC with 300, turtle slow, with 1.2x space of QLC??? Dude, WTF???
I would not have complained about fools playing the stupid game and winning the stupid prizes, if not that good flash devices all but DISAPPEARED from the market. Today you are hard pressed to find yourself a MLC drive, and SLC has all the fine qualities of unobtainium.
Building myself a home datacenter and dancing around it with replacement drives day after day after day, is not the life I desire to be forced into. And still it seems there is dedicated effort to make storage devices as unreliable as possible; to get home users to give up and gift all their data to "the Cloud" and the Wise Masters who own it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday March 10 2021, @02:30PM (1 child)
8-bits-per-cell OLC, anybody?
Luckily, TLC is not disappearing from the market just yet. DRAM and "SLC cache" can make up for the speed loss. The write endurance is not needed for most consumer devices. The capacity increases from 3D stacking can also cover up these issues. 1 TB drives can have a bigger cache than 256 GB, and so on, and the user is even less likely to fill a larger drive hundreds of times.
Back when planar NAND was reaching its limits, I remember seeing research about rejuvenating NAND to increase endurance. It's probably this:
https://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/2012/12/04/heating-nand-brings-it-back-to-life/ [silvertonconsulting.com]
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7524803 [ieee.org]
3D NAND allowed Samsung, Micron, et al. to kick the can down the road on fixing NAND's issues for at least a decade. They are going to shoot for no less than 512 layers, using string stacking. QLC is probably fine for most people, as long as the drive size is large, but TLC could stick around because QLC is not much cheaper. For something stupid like PLC, unpowered data retention may become an issue.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @03:58PM
TLC is proven to lose data in a few years if left unpowered. And its being powered does not do magic, it does periodic rewrites... eating into that "not needed" endurance limit.
SLC, on the other hand, does not deteriorate for a decade at least (had one drive sitting in a drawer for that long, all contents in perfect state afterwards).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @03:26PM (3 children)
TLC is the sweet spot, probably. 1000 writes is enough if you don't flog it horribly, and it will probably be obsolete before it wears out. I got a new NVMe TLC drive to replace my old SATA system disk a month ago and despite copying over my whole OS, I still don't even have one full write. At this rate it will last decades even if I only get the minimum 300 writes (but I don't use it for swap space). TLC is still readily available - easier to find than a non-SMR mechanical consumer drive, and with less of a price premium too. I have never seen a MLC drive in NVMe configuration, though I have a couple in SATA form. SLC is for data centers where write lifetime is essential. Too expensive otherwise.
One thing that I like about SSDs is that the minimum price is so low. You can get a cheap SATA SSD for $20, and SD cards for $5. Abuse them all you want, it's disposable, just throw it out when it dies. Mechanical storage never costs much less than $50 new, and at the low end isn't even all that much of a price advantage, because manufacturing that high precision machinery is just inherently pricey. Mechanical drives scale up, but SSDs scale down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @04:00PM (2 children)
Cue the dancing with replacement drives. DO NOT WANT.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 11 2021, @02:05AM (1 child)
All drives fail. Used to be if you got five years out of a mechanical drive you were doing well. Of course until the late 00's most cases were basically hard disk torture chambers without airflow or vibration damping. I have a few mechanical drives, the oldest of which is a 2008 1TB WD Green (these are known for longevity as long as you manage their idle spindown). It's starting to make bearing noise and probably only has a year or so left. This is the best case scenario for a mechanical drive - but attainable if you have a healthy drive environment.
My main OS installation is from 2007 (the benefits of rolling release) and it's been through four drive migrations. You have to do this whether you like it or not.
It seems like we're getting into a place where drive capacity is increasing faster than the need for it. There's a good chance that my new SSD lasts over a decade before it's either obsolete or fails. There's a nonzero chance that my next one outlasts me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 11 2021, @02:03PM
Problem is not the system drive but archive ones. A proper drive should NOT fail while lying in a drawer.
(Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Wednesday March 10 2021, @11:50PM
Totally agree these high capacity drives are junk as actuator/head failure is way too high. Possibly another reason they are going to double up on this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @11:00AM
I have a 500GB Seagate Barracuda that has resulted in corrupted ext? partitions multiple times, a 3TB that would corrupt everything past the first ~100GB with bad sector errors (can't tell if it's firmware or some other issue.) and then a 1TB and 1.5TB that are both still running bug-free 10+ years on. (Due for an upgrade, but thanks to Fry's last couple of years I haven't had a place to buy them since I don't order online or have a credit card.)