Seagate: We'll bring down the HAMR in 2017. But will we give you shingles? Seagate has been talking about coming disk tech and expects to have a HAMR product in 2017. We have better visibility into Seagate’s view of the ending of the current perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) era. The ending is delayed by narrowing the tracks so as to cram more of them on a platter. This is called two-dimensional …
I've been told that since Seagate closed their advanced research facility and fired all of their bleeding-edge PhDs, all of those physicists have entirely left the field. Nobody else (i.e. WD) had or has an equivalent facility. All improvements you will see in the future of spinning rust will be incremental progress on technologies that have already been discovered, unless someone sees fit to create a new lab, and spend 10 years building the expertise again.
So this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: There will be no more significant advances in HD tech. As a result, SSDs will triumph and HDs will fade away except maybe for archival purposes.
"I've been told that since Seagate closed their advanced research facility and fired all of their bleeding-edge PhDs,..."
No, they just moved R&D to Ireland:
http://www.investni.com/news/major-research-and-development-investment-announced-by-seagate.html
And the announcement says they will doing the HAMR development at this facility.
Seagate knows that FLASH will replace spinning rust. Putting a lot of R&D behind spinning rust will not bring an ROI. HAMR will probably be the last new HDD technology deployed. FLASH already beats any HDD except in capacity but that will soon change. FLASH also beats any HDD in throughput, in low power utilization and lower heat output.
It'd be a big deal if they didn't make junk. Our companies and clients have all dumped Seagate. We have been filtering them out once new drives started to fail and Seagate wasn't really interested. Like my year old 500GB back up drive, it came in a computer that was parted out, that just hammered. It's going to cost me dearly, thousands. And I was in the process of cloning/moving it to a WD. Perfect timing. Get rid of the junk.
Shingled writing is a way to make up for the fact that the narrowest write head possible with current technology and physical limits is still wider than the narrowest possible read head.
HAMR makes it possible to make the write head effectively even smaller - only the area heated by the laser will be affected by the magnetic field so it doesn't matter if the write head is too big. At least as far as I understand it, this makes shingled writing irrelevant.
Do you have any specific information that HAMR and shingled writing can be combined in any way or is this just speculation?
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