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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Western Digital recently announced plans [soylentnews.org] to use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) to build its next generation of hard disk drives instead of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording [wikipedia.org] (HAMR). WD promised that initial drives will ship in 2019, with 40 terabyte drives available by 2025.

In response [seagate.com], Seagate has reiterated its plans to produce HAMR hard disk drives [tomshardware.com] 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 [wikipedia.org] and two-dimensional magnetic recording [ieee.org] (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 [soylentnews.org]
Seagate HAMR Hard Drives Coming in a Year and a Half [soylentnews.org]
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters [soylentnews.org]

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