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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.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:04AM (3 children)
The price per gigabyte has been flat for years now. I need more space but 8TB drives are finally coming in at under $200. I'm not buying any Seagate garbage either, the extra money for HGST is worth it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:22AM
Gee, I can't imagine why...
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-stats-q2-2017/ [backblaze.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:13AM (1 child)
Looks like 8 TB has dropped down to $160-170 several times (both Seagate and WD/HGST):
https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?src=SearchBarV2&q=8tb&searcharea=deals&searchin=first [slickdeals.net]
The price per GB (or TB) has been incredibly flat compared to previous decades. 2 cents per GB if we go by $160/8TB. I believe it was about 3.5 cents per GB ($70/2TB) before the Thai floods, 3 cents per GB ($100/3TB) around 2013 or so, and 2.5 cents per GB ($100/4TB or $200/8TB) around 2015 or so. Those are consumer sale prices rather than whatever Backblaze [backblaze.com] was paying.
The longer it takes for HAMR or bit-patterned media or other HDD advances to be deployed, the more likely it will be for SSDs to destroy HDDs. And it will happen without much fuss since both Western Digital and Seagate have diversified into SSDs with big acquisitions. We might get a bad situation where consumer/enterprise HDD development grinds to a complete halt several years before NAND actually reaches the same $/TB. Meaning people like you who need bulk data storage will be SOL.
I want to believe in a world where we pay 1 cent or less per GB ($100 for 10 TB). We won't get there without the long-delayed HAMR [wikipedia.org]-ing.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:45AM
> I want to believe in a world where we pay 1 cent or less per GB ($100 for 10 TB).
History lesson -- a college friend started a small company, must have been late 1970s. He bought DRAM from Intel in modest quantities and resold it in small quantities to early computer hobbyists. The name of the company was Centabyte -- he was selling DRAM for $0.01 per byte (8 bits, no error correcting), and that was a very good price at the time. His competition might have been surplus/obsolete core memory found at computer junk shops.