Seagate: New HDD Tech To Enable 100 TB HDDs

[Sabre]

Article

When Samsung announced its new 2 TB Spinpoint HDD last week and mentioned that it can now store 667 GB on one 3.5-inch disk, I remembered how far the current perpendicular recording technology has come since its launch in 2006. The first 3.5-inch PMR drive, Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.5, packed only 75 GB on one disk. Back then, the storage density of PMR disks was just over 100 GB/inch2 and the industry forecasted that PMR will reach about 1 TB/inch2 until it runs out of room.

It was a natural question to ask where the current Spinpoint drive stands. It turns out that it is over 700 Gb/inch2 already, while Seagate’s mass market drives have reached 541 Gb/inch2. At the current pace, it appears that the industry will run out of room in the not too distant future. So I called up Seagate to find out more.

Seagate SVP Mark Re told me that Seagate in fact believes that there will be just a few more PMR product generations and a new technology will be necessary within 3 to 5 years as PMR may reach its end just north of 1 Tb/inch2. Re said that the industry has a choice to transition to patterned media or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to decrease the distance between bits on the disk and increase the maximum areal density. Re declined to pinpoint the potential of HAMR exactly, but said that Seagate currently expects a soft limit to arrive at about 50 Tb/inch2. If the 3.5” HDD form factor survives, then we should see PMR to top out at about 5-6 TB per drive. With roughly 50x the potential of PMR, HAMR should lead the way beyond 100 TB drives and possibly into the region of 200 – 300 TB in the 2020 to 2025 time frame.

Pretty amazing!

[PGT]

don't they know magnetic drives are dead?

[Sabre]

I don't think that SSD's will surpass magnetic drives anytime soon. Honestly, most servers really are not pushing them that hard (unless you're talking about DB's and such). I can see magnetic media moving to snapshotting and near line storage duties though. Sort of like how SCSI and SATA have worked out. Initially, I saw machines (NetApps, etc) with either SCSI or Fibre Channel as the main drives with SATA used to do snapshots to backup off of. SATA has now come into the main stream server market, but I'm guessing SSD and SATA might follow the same course.

[Raven]

I've only got half a gig worth of stuff on my storage server, not sure what I would do with the storage densities they're proposing. Frankly I don't care, as long as GBs keep getting cheaper I'm happy. Still I don't see myself replacing my RAID 1 1.5TB server any time soon.

[PGT]

I've got a 4TB NAS (2.7TB usable). It's 5% full. One has to DL a ton of pr0n to use more than 1TB these days

obviously, for business, this isn't a problem (the data usage thing...not the DL )

[complacent]

I've got our entire photo, music and dvd libraries in digits... have so for a couple years now. Replicate it locally and remotely. I honestly can't see a home-use need for more than a TB or two, unless you're some sicko photobug that shoots in nothing other than RAW and has done so for 10 years, or an "amateur film producer".

bandwidth otoh... never enough of that stuff for sure.

[Sabre]

One has to DL a ton of pr0n to use more than 1TB these days

bandwidth otoh... never enough of that stuff for sure.

There is never enough.