back to article Seagate plans to bring down the 16TB HAMR... soon(er)

Stifel MD Aaron Rakers went on a Seagate booth tour at SC16 and notes Seagate thinks it is a year ahead of WD and Toshiba with HAMR (Heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology. It is targeting 2018 for HAMR drive deliveries, with a 16TB 3.5-inch drive planned, featuring 8 platters and 16 heads. We assume it will be helium- …

  1. yet_another_wumpus

    I looked at HAMR and thought "wasn't that the tech that Steve Jobs was pushing on the NeXT optical drives? Then I realized just how useless a laser would be to writing 21st century (or even 1990s) hard drive densities. The real effect is pretty freaky.

  2. Tezfair

    Its all fine and dandy having large drives, until you realise you also have to back up that volume of data. I had a 6tb start showing signs of failure and had a 5Tb virtual disk on it. In the end I had to make a storage space with all manner of disks to achieve the volume needed to pull the data.

  3. joed

    8 platters for 16TB drive? So where are that data density gains?

    Also, performance of HAMR drives will drop for any write operation (probably whoever cared for this has already moved on to the SSDs), hopefully durability will remain unaffected.

    1. Ammaross Danan

      Current helium drives use 7 platters to store 8 and 10TB of data. Adding one more platter and hitting 16TB is a marked density increase and this is only Gen1. They'll likely be double even that density in 5-10yrs.

      1. Aitor 1

        Deliver

        Assumptions here fail as they are failing to deliver, year after year.

        On may, it was going to be 2017. On November, it is 2018.

        My guess is that in april they will say 2019...

      2. mi1400

        Or they will first make 16TB drives in either ...

        1. Google requested form factors... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/googles_call_for_cloudier_taller_disks_is_a_tall_order_says_analyst/

        2. BigFoot

        3. Passport drives (as even today they dont follow any strict form factor rules)

        my comment there...

        "Bring back the Quantum Bigfoot!" ...

        To add my part... The track-zero aka circumference of platter should be as large as possible inline to bigfoot concept, the spindle portion i.e. inner most track should also as large as possible. may the spindle axle remain same in diameter but the writable data be denied to several inner most tracks. .. say last/inner most track circumference should NOT be lesser than 30% of trackzero circumference. this will avoid the crawl speed reading of data from inner most tracks where spindle is rotating still no matter at 15k. Inner most 30% area of platter (think platter circumference) should be plastic not even metal to keep those shut asking about its wastage. or there should be a firmware unlock feature only those stupid will enable for themselves.

        Also there should be a firmware based hdd defragger. the world has suffered enough damage at hands of OS based defraggers and their fancies. a firmware based hdd defragger should intelligently keep moving the hottest data towards trackzero aka outermost track/ring.

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Gis Bun

    Just think of all the porn that can store if in an array....

    :-)

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