80TB 3.5-inch HDDs could be possible with next-gen HAMR platters!

18.02.2020 1,722 5

Martin Pramatarov

The amount of data that people generate daily is mind-blowing. According to Raconteur, people on Facebook generate 4 petabytes (PB), Twitter users tweet 500 million times, WhatsApp users exchange 65 billion messages daily and so on. Millions of Photos, Videos, application data and more are generated even while you are reading this article. We constantly need more space a solution for which is proposed by Showa Denko K.K. (SDK).

Next-gen HAMR platters

SDK keeps improving its products. The next step is the improved Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The R&D team has changed the thin magnetic film with a very tiny crystal grain-sized one. This way it is possible to maximize the density to the extent that 70TB and 80TB HDDs with 3.5-inch size could be built.

The key difference between the HAMR HDD platters and the typical ones is the magnetic layer. SDK uses a Fe-Pt alloy that drastically boosts the magnetic coercivity. This is needed because with the shrinking of the crystal grains, their individual magnetic signature gets weaker. Without the new materials there could be unwanted magnetic inter-track interferences that could lead to unreadable HDDs.

These new platters need more energy and precise heating while writing data. The HAMR HDDs have to be very strong to manage the entire process correctly. They will be some of the most durable HDDs out there.

The current conventional magnetic recording (CMR) platters have around 1.14 Tb/in2 density and without a change in the process, there is no feasible hope to significantly increase this number. The HAMR’s goal is to reach between 5 and 6 Tb/in2 density (around 5 times more) and create monstrous 70 TB or 80 TB 3.5-inch HDDs.

SDK is the largest independent HDD platters maker. The company already works with HDD producers like Seagate and Western Digital, so it is possible that the first HAMR HDD could be released in partnership with another brand.

Will this new technology have commercial success? We will see very soon. Seagate will start using HAMR in 20TB drives at the end of 2020. Very soon it can become the new standard for the HDDs.

If you are interested in future storage solutions we recommend that you check out the following articles: An ultra-durable quartz glass data storage system by Microsoft and Microsoft can save data on DNA now. Will the current data centers be obsolete? The world data will only grow, so we will really need these types of innovations to be able to keep up with it.

Source: https://www.sdk.co.jp/english/news/2020/37882.html