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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

AnandTech interviewed Mark Re, SVP and Chief Technology Officer of Seagate, to talk about plans for upcoming hard disk drive technologies [anandtech.com].

Although shingled magnetic recording [wikipedia.org] (SMR) lowers write speeds, a number of techniques help reduce the impact, such as banding together SMR tracks into certain zones with perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) zones covering the rest of the drive rather than shingling, or adding more SLC NAND and DRAM cache. Seagate will be expanding its use of SMR to increase density in client drives, not just "cold storage" drives, but will be using partial SMR/partial PMR and caching in order to mitigate write performance issues.

For the moment, Seagate won't be using helium outside of products for capacity-demanding datacenter customers (such as the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 10 TB HDD [soylentnews.org]). The company can reduce fluid flow forces inside air-filled HDDs using purely mechanical solutions. On the other hand, Western Digital has introduced helium-filled drives aimed at consumers and has a marketing name for its technology (HelioSeal).

Mark Re confirmed [anandtech.com] that the first drives using two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR), a technology that can currently boost areal density by 5-10%, will be released in mid-2017. This technology may be refined in later years for bigger increases in density. TDMR makes tracks narrower and pitches smaller, and uses an array of drive heads to read data from multiple nearby tracks in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The HDD controller is able to determine the correct data based on input from several locations. This technology can boost read performance and can also be combined with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) in the future. TDMR drives are expected to be more expensive due to the need for multiple drive heads, new motors, and new controllers with increased bandwidth requirements.

Seagate is preparing a new generation of 10K and 15K RPM spindle speed hard drives, a market which has shrunk considerably in recent years due to the rise of solid-state drives. The new 10K drives will use TDMR. These may be the last generations of high-RPM HDDs since SSDs will inevitably capture the rest of the market.

HAMR drives will be shipped for evaluation in 2017, and sold to businesses in 2018. Consumer drives are further off. Seagate's HAMR implementation uses a 20 mW, 810nm wavelength laser to heat tiny portions of drive platters to temperatures of 450°C. Using HAMR, Seagate has achieved an areal density of about 2 Tb/inch².

Related:

HGST Announces Delivery of First 10 TB Helium/Shingled HDDs [soylentnews.org]
Seagate Unveils Enlarged Spy Drive With Support for 64 Spycams [soylentnews.org]
HGST Announces 10 Terabyte PMR Hard Drive [soylentnews.org]
Seagate Faces Lawsuit Over Defective Hard Drives [soylentnews.org]
Seagate Unveils Fastest Ever Solid State Drive [soylentnews.org]

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