Storage Review: 80TB Hard Disk Drive

The platters use a new thin magnetic layer to optimize their data density, a goal that allows 70TB of 80TB hard drives to reach a 3.5-inch form factor. The new 80TB hard drives were announced last week, and Showa and Denko (SDK) announced that they have completed work on a new generation of heat-assisted magnetic record media (HAMR) for hard drives. The companies claim that the new platters can reach the area density of up to 6 TB per square inch, offering four to five times as much as current platters

Earlier this year, Seagate began shipping 20TB hard drives that use heat-assisted magnetic recording technology (HAMR) and the SDK goes further, promising that its heat-assisted magnetic recording and HAMR drives will enable 80TB drives. Later this year Toshiba is expected to utilize the SDK for 2TB MAMR hard drives in its 18TB hard drives. The company also expects to use SDKs with MAMRs plates on its 18-inch hard drives later this year.

The largest capacity external hard drives, such as the Aegis Padlock DT FIP and Seagate Iron Wolf Pro, contain about 1.8 TB of information that conventional users would struggle to replenish. However, this capacity will increase over time thanks to technological developments. In 2020, HAMR technology will be announced to ensure that the hard disk material is steel and not cobalt like conventional hard disks. It should be noted that with a data density of 6 TB per square inch, hard disks up to 80 TB are visible

To build a 40 TB hard drive with nine drives, Seagate had to increase the area density of its media from 2600GB in2 to 26TB in2. By comparison, today's 16TB CMR, PMR, and TDMR hard drives use nine hard drives, increasing their density by 5.2% and enabling drives with capacities up to 80TB. In contrast, Showa and Denko believe that HAMR-based media can reach surface densities in the future 5-6TB / in2, a high density that would increase the capacity of hard drives many times, up to 70TB and 80TB for 35-inch drives, without increasing the number of drives.

SDK is the world's largest independent manufacturer of hard disk drives, with major players such as Seagate and WD preferring to use proprietary media to keep costs down. According to IDC’s forecasts, HDD will remain the primary storage technology for all use cases by 2024, with 54% of the total data stored by spinning plates. To compensate for this slowdown, hard disk manufacturers are adding 2TB drives and promoting SMR (Shingle Magnetic Recording) technology for data center drives

Not surprisingly, major hard drive manufacturers such as Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba are doubling their hard drive roadmaps. According to recent products and technology roadmaps of the company, Seagate is on track to deliver a hard drive in 2026 and a hard drive in 2030, with 120TB units within the next decade. Western Digital Corporation provides Energy Assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) hard drives (18TB CMR and 20TB SMR), and Seagate announced its 20TB HAMR hard drives in the mid-2020s. The new hard drives will use HAMR media manufactured by Seagate and also used in SDK media.

The first standard IBM hard drives have 350 hard drives, about the size of two medium-sized refrigerators, and can store up to five million 6-bit characters (375 megabytes). 17 batches of 52 hard drives with 100 interfaces can be used. The company says the media has a storage capacity of 2 TB on an aluminum substrate. The HAMR Hard Drives 2.0TB will use HAMR media produced internally by Seagate, but can also use SDK media.

IBM's first hard drive, the IBM 350, used a stack of fifty 24" disks to store 375MB of data, the size of a modern digital image and a size comparable to two large refrigerators. The world's largest solid-state drive, an inconspicuous-looking kit with a whopping 3,072 terabytes of storage, is built into a 32-stick 1TB NAND flash package with 16 layers of 512GB V-NAND chips. It is the largest memory ever crammed into a 2.5-inch form factor and designed for corporate customers who want to break away from the mechanical parts of their standard hard drive.

The big advantage of the DS214 is that you can expand your storage capacity with a USB3 port on the back of the drive and a single eSATA port. It is a tool-free, hot-swappable drive that is great for accessing mobile devices. After downloading Sinology Cloud Station software, you can use it with Dropbox to sync between devices.

Showa Denko Corporation Denko is a Japanese manufacturer of HD media and the largest independent manufacturer of HDDs and magnetic media. The three main hard disk drives manufacturers predict all the advances in area density (relative to data volume per spinning disc) made possible by hard disks and the development of HAMR (heat-associated magnetic recording) technology. Japanese HD recording media company Showa (now Denko SDK) appears to have completed its first series of new HD media films and is looking to work with hard drive manufacturers on the next HD media, HAMR-based hard drives that will be used and the commercialization of this technology is accelerating to a comprehensive offering.

It will be another three to five years before hard drives are ready for prime time with 2,600GB / in2 and 2.6TB / in2 densities. Seagate will need to polish the media technology that drives its products several years later by developing appropriate heads, drive controls, and other electronics. During drive development, it will be critical to maximizing the magnetic coercivity of the next generation of hard disk drives as the crystal grains used to record data become smaller.

Hard drives write data in constant bits per second, which means that each track contains the same amount of data, but modern hard drives have been using zone-bit recording since the 1990s to increase write speed, since inner and outer zones can store more data per track than outer zones. Another technology called Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) uses a similar concept to HAMR (which Seagate advocates, as shown below), but uses microwave heat to change the records. HAMR works by heating the hard disk material during the writing process to allow data to be written in a smaller space, increasing the capacity.

Daniel is a freelance passionate writer for hire with a specialization in Data Recovery, Computer repair, technology updates, IT services, Digital Marketing Services in Data retravel Group.