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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 TheRaven on Monday September 18 2017, @09:55AM
My 4-year-old laptop has a 1TB SSD and most of our build machines typically have 512GB SSDs that are used with ZFS as log and cache devices for RAID-1 disks (stuff rarely needs reading from the disks, because the SSDs are large enough for the working set). 64GB is a really odd place for the cost-benefit calculation to win. I'm not even sure where you'd buy them anymore. A quick look shows 128GB SSDs costing around £50, with 256GB costing around 50% more, 512GB around double that, and 1TB around 60% more than that, so 1TB comes pretty close to the sweet spot. That said, you don't buy SSDs at all if capacity is your bottleneck, you buy them if IOPS is your bottleneck and in that case the 1TB drives are very cheap in comparison to anything else on the market (and NVMe is even cheaper).
sudo mod me up