WDC and Seagate Consider 10-Plate Hard Drives

This year, following Toshiba, WDC and Seagate began producing hard drives with 9 magnetic platters. This became possible due to the appearance of both thinner plates, and with the transition to sealed blocks with plates in which air is replaced by helium. The lower density of helium puts less stress on the plates and leads to lower power consumption by the spindle motors. Thus, the capacity of HDD drives has taken another step forward - up to 16–18 TB in the case of normal perpendicular recording and up to 18–20 TB when using “tiled” recording of the SMR type. And then opinions are divided...

According to Western Digital, the company will continue to increase hard drive capacity by moving to microwave-assisted recording (MAMR) platters, and Seagate by adopting locally heated magnetic platters (HAMR) technology. Released with MAMR support uncomfortable. Either she is, or she is not. And drives with HAMR promised to mass release in the first half of 2020 in the form of conventional 18TB HDD and 20TB with SMR. But there is also a third opinion. It lies in the fact that hard drives with MAMR and HAMR may linger until 2022, and as an alternative, in 2021, HDDs with 10 conventional magnetic platters will appear in large quantities.

According to Trendfocus analysts, WDC and Seagate are working on a 10-platter hard drive. The prerequisite for the emergence of such specialists is the slow adaptation of drives with SMR technology in the niche of the so-called nearline HDDs. Hard disks of the nearline class are conditionally a buffer between slow disk storages and RAM (as an option, between caching arrays and disk storage). SMR technology requires time to write data because it comes with partial track overlap. Builders of disk arrays are reluctant to take SMR models and would gladly meet regular HDDs with higher capacities.

According to Trendfocus, the low demand for SMR models and the rawness of MAMR / HAMR technology will force manufacturers to focus on the production of conventional recording HDDs. In other words, from the beginning of 2020, 18TB HDD with perpendicular recording and 9 platters will be mass-produced with a transition to 20TB HDD with SMR towards the end of 2020, and from 2021, 20TB HDD with 10 platters will begin to be released, followed by release in 2022 of more capacious HDDs with MAMR/HAMR technologies without SMR.

Source: 3dnews.ru