Western Digital Plans First 16TB HDDs

Late final yr, Seagate introduced that it will convey 16TB HDDs to market in 2019, assisted by its improvement of recent know-how to spice up drive areal density. Now, Western Digital has declared that it's additionally sampling its new 16TB drives, solely they don't use the HAMR know-how Seagate has developed. As a substitute, WD is counting on a unique strategy, dubbed MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording).

With HAMR (Head Assisted Magnetic Recording), the drive media is heated earlier than writing. This heating makes it simpler to write down to the media, but additionally requires some materials adjustments. The media needs to be able to heating and cooling in a short time and should stand up to this cycle hundreds of occasions. MAMR doesn't require the identical thermal transitions or materials adjustments — it embeds a spin torque oscillator within the drive head. This lowers the floor resistance of the magnetic materials and permits the drive to be written to extra simply. Each applied sciences had been developed to permit HDD areal density to proceed to scale. Drive density has been bettering far more slowly than it as soon as did, permitting SSDs to shut the hole with HDDs when it comes to capacities extra rapidly than they could in any other case. Onerous drives nonetheless have an absolute benefit so far as affordability per GB, however the hole has been shrinking for years.