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HOYA Starts to Build Next-Gen HDD Glass Substrate Production Facility
HOYA Corp., an optical glass maker from Japan, announced this week that it had started construction of its new production facility for hard drive platter glass substrates. These substrates could be used to make conventional 2.5-inch HDD platters as well as next-generation platters for hard drives that use energy-assisted magnetic recording technologies (HAMR, MAMR).
The manufacturing facility will cost HOYA around ¥30 billion ($270.5 million) and will start production at the beginning of 2020, according to a media report. Located in the Saysettha Development Zone (SDZ) in Laos, the factory will be HOYA's third plant that produces glass substrates for hard drives. Being the newest one, the facility will use the latest manufacturing equipment and technologies, so it will be ready to make the most advanced substrates that will then be used by makers of platters (e.g., Seagate, Showa Denko, Western Digital) to manufacture next-gen HDD media. HOYA's other substrate manufacturing capacities are located in Thailand, and Vietnam.
Nowadays glass substrates for HDD platters are mainly used to make media for 2.5-inch hard drives for laptops and datacenters. As sales of 2.5-inch HDDs for notebooks are dropping because of cheaper SSDs, demand for these platters and substrates is decreasing as well. In the meantime, the use of glass substrates and platters in 3.5-inch drives is gaining traction as makers of datacenter HDDs start to use them both for existing and next-gen hard drives that use energy-assisted recording technologies. Glass substrates have a number of advantages when compared to aluminum substrates: they are thinner, lighter, more rigid, they expand less than aluminum when heated, and they may be made flatter. In the end, they are [preferable] for next-gen high-capacity HDDs.
Previously: Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @12:49AM (10 children)
IBM used glass in their 3.5 "Deskstar" drives, which didn't go well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @01:01AM
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=30008&page=1&cid=798198#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @01:08AM (2 children)
Those were manufactured in Hungary. Later forensic analysis discovered traces of paprika powder had caused the heads to crash and production was moved to Thailand.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Friday February 15 2019, @01:19AM
Yeah, the use of fresh chilly alleviated the defects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday February 15 2019, @01:50AM
I think it's more a case of choosing the right workforce. Here's a shot of Hungarian hard drive plant workers [wordpress.com] at the end of a shift. Here's the equivalent men in Thailand [myladyboycupid.com]. Obviously Thai men are more suited to the delicate task of assembling hard drives.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Friday February 15 2019, @01:21AM
Well, if a hard drive was in my hands, which it was, and I was feeling like "fixing" things, which I was, it didn't go well, either. I remember the time I shattered one of the platters all over my kitchen. I thought dropping a glass was bad.... Got some good magnets though!!!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @01:45AM (3 children)
If TFA is right about the market, it won't be your problem since datacenters will be the ones buying most of them. And they don't like stuff that breaks so they will probably check to see if it works first.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 15 2019, @01:51AM (2 children)
While its formula is readily reverse-engineers, it's preparation - Glassalurgy? - has been a deep, dark secret since it's invention in the fifties.
Corning hasn't rested on it's heels: today's mobile device screens are far far less prone to shattering than were those of the first iPhones. I've dropped my own iPhone 7 a whole bunch of times with nary a scratch.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Friday February 15 2019, @02:03AM
You aren't dropping it right!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Friday February 15 2019, @02:12AM
Gorilla Glass is not hard to make, once you've got hold of a few gorillas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:00PM
I had a shiny new 'Deathstar' fail on me back in the day, the issue we had was down to a faulty firmware S.M.A.R.T implementation on the drive, disable S.M.A.R.T in the bios, no issues, enable it...exit one drive, stage left...
Small mercy, this failure was on the dev box and we were prepping the image for cloning onto the other 159 shiny new Deathstars we were about to upgrade our machines with, needless to say, after a bit of digging, then shouting down the phone, we returned the rest of the drives unused to the supplier as unfit for purpose.
As an asides, I kept the failed Deathstar and eventually got it operational again, upgraded the firmware, and used it for occasional non-critical temporary file storage and transfer up to the middle of last year when I retired my last non-SATA motherboard from active duty. It lasted 16 years with no issues (other than the obvious trust one). At some point it is due to have it's magnets harvested and then the remains terminated by getting hit repeatedly with a sledgehammer, It'll be interesting to see how well the coating on the platters has held up before I shatter them.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 15 2019, @01:47AM (4 children)
I'd think their full-height form factor would work really well for high-end RAIDs.
IMHO, only truly compelling reason to make 3 1/2 drives is that everyone else makes them too.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @03:13AM (3 children)
Lower RPM, IOPS, and data rate, more vibrations, power consumption, and friction, etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/41lbip/why_dont_hdd_manufacturers_make_525_hard_drives/ [reddit.com]
The platters would have to be thicker (or slower), and it's not clear to me that you could get higher data density per unit of volume.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:26PM (2 children)
It could be an SSD.
Even if it spins, it could consist of a dozen 2.5" drives in a larger 5.25" box. Mechanical parts could be shared with laptop drives, or the box could even be a RAID enclosure that holds laptop drives.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @06:09PM
SSDs aren't limited to the shapes that HDDs have so we will see more stuff like this:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11702/intel-introduces-new-ruler-ssd-for-servers [anandtech.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 15 2019, @11:11PM
Even my lowly Core Duo - not Core _2_ Duo - Early 2006 MBP had PCIe storage.
It's a very narrow card with a card edge connector on one end. There's space to populate I think six chips. Wall the boards are the same no matter how much Flash you choose, your board will just be appropriately populated.
SATA, SAS, Storage over Ethernet, even Fiber Channel simply _cannot_ compete with plugging your bazillobytes right smack into your high-lane-count PCIexpress.
Thanks! I've been having a rough day today, but you just gave me a very happy smile.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @04:12PM (1 child)
daflattadaplattadadensadadatta?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @04:41PM
ya
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(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Saturday February 16 2019, @01:34AM
Ever learn something that by all rights you should have learned a long time ago, and then felt stupid for not already knowing it?
Yeah, that's me here. 'Wait, when did they start actually shipping drives with glass substrates?'
... damn near 30 years ago. And the reason is that glass is tougher than aluminum, at the thickness used in drive platters. Laptop drives have mostly been glass for ages now, apparently, but desktop have still used aluminum.