WD (Western Digital) plans to create a 40 TB disk, but is this enough?
The amount of data increases with a tremendous speed, which cannot be said about the volume of disks.
The main advantage of all manufacturers of hard drives has always been the volume, because they could not boast the same performance as the SSD drives. And now, the best of the best HDD manufacturers - WD - unveiled the latest technology, thanks to which the amount of disk memory can reach a whopping 40TB!
Western Digital already has a huge advantage in the market and has gone far in terms of memory from competitors - they recently introduced a 14 terabyte drive, filled with helium, in order to reduce drag on rotating plates. But thanks to the introduction of new technology - microwave magnetic recording (MAMR) - the company plans to reach a memory capacity of 40 terabytes by 2025. And prototypes promised by the middle of 2018.
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MAMR technology allows you to encode data to disk using a completely new method. Seagate, WD's main rival, is also working on a competitive product called HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording), which translates to thermo-assisted magnetic recording. Let us leave an explanation of the subtleties of the methods and engineering processes for IT geeks, because the end user is only interested in one thing - when can he buy it? And this should happen in 2019, after a long 13 years of research and development. Yes, the MAMR method was invented in 2006 by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and improvements are still being made.
Hard disks, like semiconductors, obey the laws of physics and will not get anywhere from them. Every year it becomes harder and harder to reduce the size of the device while trying to increase the amount of memory.
Western Digital representatives believe that MAMR technology will reduce the cost of storing one terabyte of data, which is another advantage over SSDs. The cost of storing data on hard drives at the rate of 1 terabyte has always been much cheaper than on an SSD, due to the fact that it is easier to store more data in the same place on the hard drive than in a flash memory chip. It is expected that MAMR and HAMR technologies will allow disk manufacturers to fill up to 4 terabits per square inch of a disk plate, which significantly exceeds the characteristics of hard drives today - 1.1 terabits per square inch.
At the moment, the trend is that the amount of data and information is increasing in such a progression that hard drive manufacturers simply do not have time to increase the memory of devices to meet the requirements by 100%.
According to research by the international research and consulting company IDC (by the way, it is sponsored by Seagate), by 2025 the global volume of all data will increase to 163 zetabytes (1 zeb = trillion gigabytes). This is 10 times the amount of data generated in 2016, it was equal to only 16.1 Zetabytes. Most of this data will come from Big Data and analytics, especially from the Internet of Things (IoT) resource, where touch sensors will collect gigabytes of data per second.
And the most interesting is that the volume of this data is so enormous that many companies do not even use all the information. They dump their accumulated data into the so-called “data lakes”, which will later be gradually processed, and maybe no one will ever touch them. There are statistics that show that up to 90% of the collected data is not used at all. But nevertheless they should be stored somewhere, and then a hard disk comes to the rescue.
Keep in mind that this only applies to BigData. Of course, users also generate a huge amount of data. BackBlaze, an Internet backup and storage developer, noted that his popularity began to grow dramatically after he began to conduct statistics and report failures of hard drives from different manufacturers.
Studies were carried out on hundreds of thousands of hard drives located in its own data centers. It is already known that BackBlaze made an order for a disk storage of 100 petabytes in size and by the end of the fourth quarter of this year it is planned to put this storage into full operation. In addition, the company plans another large order for the first quarter of next year. And this is just one online storage provider among dozens of others.
This is of course great news for Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other manufacturers of hard drives.
Original article: Western Digital plans 40TB drives, but it's still not enough
The main advantage of all manufacturers of hard drives has always been the volume, because they could not boast the same performance as the SSD drives. And now, the best of the best HDD manufacturers - WD - unveiled the latest technology, thanks to which the amount of disk memory can reach a whopping 40TB!
Western Digital already has a huge advantage in the market and has gone far in terms of memory from competitors - they recently introduced a 14 terabyte drive, filled with helium, in order to reduce drag on rotating plates. But thanks to the introduction of new technology - microwave magnetic recording (MAMR) - the company plans to reach a memory capacity of 40 terabytes by 2025. And prototypes promised by the middle of 2018.
')
MAMR technology allows you to encode data to disk using a completely new method. Seagate, WD's main rival, is also working on a competitive product called HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording), which translates to thermo-assisted magnetic recording. Let us leave an explanation of the subtleties of the methods and engineering processes for IT geeks, because the end user is only interested in one thing - when can he buy it? And this should happen in 2019, after a long 13 years of research and development. Yes, the MAMR method was invented in 2006 by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and improvements are still being made.
Hard drive physics
Hard disks, like semiconductors, obey the laws of physics and will not get anywhere from them. Every year it becomes harder and harder to reduce the size of the device while trying to increase the amount of memory.
Western Digital representatives believe that MAMR technology will reduce the cost of storing one terabyte of data, which is another advantage over SSDs. The cost of storing data on hard drives at the rate of 1 terabyte has always been much cheaper than on an SSD, due to the fact that it is easier to store more data in the same place on the hard drive than in a flash memory chip. It is expected that MAMR and HAMR technologies will allow disk manufacturers to fill up to 4 terabits per square inch of a disk plate, which significantly exceeds the characteristics of hard drives today - 1.1 terabits per square inch.
The amount of hard disk memory does not keep up with the data volumes
At the moment, the trend is that the amount of data and information is increasing in such a progression that hard drive manufacturers simply do not have time to increase the memory of devices to meet the requirements by 100%.
According to research by the international research and consulting company IDC (by the way, it is sponsored by Seagate), by 2025 the global volume of all data will increase to 163 zetabytes (1 zeb = trillion gigabytes). This is 10 times the amount of data generated in 2016, it was equal to only 16.1 Zetabytes. Most of this data will come from Big Data and analytics, especially from the Internet of Things (IoT) resource, where touch sensors will collect gigabytes of data per second.
And the most interesting is that the volume of this data is so enormous that many companies do not even use all the information. They dump their accumulated data into the so-called “data lakes”, which will later be gradually processed, and maybe no one will ever touch them. There are statistics that show that up to 90% of the collected data is not used at all. But nevertheless they should be stored somewhere, and then a hard disk comes to the rescue.
Keep in mind that this only applies to BigData. Of course, users also generate a huge amount of data. BackBlaze, an Internet backup and storage developer, noted that his popularity began to grow dramatically after he began to conduct statistics and report failures of hard drives from different manufacturers.
Studies were carried out on hundreds of thousands of hard drives located in its own data centers. It is already known that BackBlaze made an order for a disk storage of 100 petabytes in size and by the end of the fourth quarter of this year it is planned to put this storage into full operation. In addition, the company plans another large order for the first quarter of next year. And this is just one online storage provider among dozens of others.
This is of course great news for Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other manufacturers of hard drives.
Original article: Western Digital plans 40TB drives, but it's still not enough
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/343842/
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