HDD will beat SSD on capacity as 80TB hard drives loom

The enterprise driving the platters that electric power millions of difficult disk drives worldwide has verified it has finished do the job on a new generation of warmth assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media.

Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) promises the new platters will attain areal density of five to 6TB per square inch, which is in between four and five periods what latest platters give.

The major difficult disk drives on the marketplace give up to 9 spinning disks. If SDK’s numbers are accurate, this signifies 80TB difficult drives could turn out to be a fact this 10 years.

Immediately after collection of acquisitions and consolidations, only 3 primary difficult disk suppliers stay currently. Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba all develop millions of HDDs, with an growing amount going to hyperscale provider providers like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

The major difficult disk drive at the moment available is a 20TB model from Western Digital, the Ultrastar HC650, which works by using a know-how called SMR.

As for pricing, the most affordable difficult disk drive by ability has a per Terabyte rate approaching $fifteen, which would put the rate of an 80TB difficult drive at close to $one,two hundred.

That may possibly seem a lot, but the prospective price savings in conditions of storage ability, electric power usage and standard routine maintenance would probable outweigh the funds expenditure.

By way of Anandtech