The Road to 80 TB HAMR HDDs
takyon writes:
The Road to 80 TB HDDs: Showa Denko Develops HAMR Platters for Hard Drives
Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) has unveiled the the company has finished the development of its next-generation heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media for hard drives. The platters use all-new magnetic thin films with a very small crystal grain size in order to maximize their areal density, with the goal of eventually enabling 3.5-inch HDDs to be built with capacities of 70 TB to 80 TB.
SDK's platters for HAMR HDDs are made of aluminum and feature thin film magnetic layer made of an Fe-Pt alloy. To improve the magnetic coercivity of the media by several times over existing platters, Showa Denko used a new structure of magnetic layers and implemented new ways of controlling the temperature of the media during production.
[...] SDK is not disclosing the recording density of its new platters nor are they making specific promises about when it intends to start mass production of next-generation disks. Meanwhile, the company notes that today's leading-edge conventional magnetic recording (CMR) platters feature recording density of about 1.14 Tb/in2 and it is widely believed that this is not going to grow significantly without using energy assisted recording methods. By contrast, Showa Denko believes, HAMR-based media will achieve areal density of 5-6 Tb/in2 in the future, which will increase capacity of hard drives by several times, all the way to 70 TB - 80 TB per 3.5-inch drive without increasing the number of platters. For comparison's sake, today's 16 TB CMR (PMR+TDMR) HDDs use nine disks, so increasing their density by ~5.2X would enable drives featuring capacities higher than 80 TB.
Western Digital is slowly transitioning towards the use of microwave and heat-assisted drives:
Western Digital's development of hard drive technology is advancing on several fronts to push the limits of their high-capacity enterprise HDDs. Helium is old news, and used in all their drives larger than 10TB. Lately, the most attention has been focused on Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR), both of which fall under the heading of energy-assisted recording. Western Digital is still a few years away from deploying either HAMR or MAMR, but their upcoming generation of hard drives takes the first steps in that direction.
This year, WDC is starting to deliver their latest generation of high-capacity enterprise hard drives which were announced in 2019: the 16TB and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 and the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC640 with shingled magnetic recording (SMR). All of these new models will feature WDC's first energy-assisted recording technology which they have dubbed ePMR. This is still a fairly ill-defined transitional feature, but it is based on some of the parts needed to implement MAMR. WDC's roadmaps have them sticking with ePMR for a few more years before fully implementing either HAMR or MAMR technology.
CMR (PMR+TDMR) = conventional magnetic recording, aka perpendicular magnetic recording, with the added use of two-dimensional magnetic recording. Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) can boost capacity further, but with reduced write performance.
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