New generation of ultra-capacity hard drives

How about a 300 TB data hard drive? Or an HD with 100 PB (Petabytes) of storage? Is this possible? Yes, and the new technology promises.

With the emergence of solid state drives, and the prediction of falling prices, hard drive engineering has rocked and is working on a new hard drive model that will extend its longevity far above any SSD in terms of data storage .

This week we saw several disputes, with Western Digital showing its disks with Helium gas inside to store 6TB of data, and then rival Seagate has already shown traditional hard drives (without helium) with up to 8TB of data.

Western Digital had, obviously, the new Helium HD with 10TB up its sleeve, and it has already launched its release forecast, and Seagate had to run after it, but it was also able to squeeze dishes in one unit and in turn launch the 10TB HD.

However, this race this week tries to reach the limit because there is no more to do with the current magnetic structure, due to the main problem: The smaller the recording area, we cannot record more data.

This is due to the fact that the recording head arrives in a state that sends energy to magnetize a very small area, or it would damage the data of the sectors in its surroundings or it would not be enough to magnetize an area because the magnetic power is very weak.

Currently the read head is already much smaller in size, but the write head is still at its current size for some years.

Then the discovery that no one was expecting: Lasers can do this job, dispensing with the "bulky" recording head existing on hard drives today, allowing every inch to fit 10 TB of data (today, only a few GB are practiced per inch) data, with each dish having 1.2 TB of data).

This is why hard disk companies have accelerated and delivered everything they had these weeks to the market, as they already aim soon that the technology is ready for commercial use, at least in "low capacity" disks for the new technology. .

Until now, companies were holding on to existing technology under their sleeve as much as possible, as there was nothing more to offer users, increasing their storage capacity gradually over time and still achieving relevance in the market.

The new technology that tries to change this whole scenario is called HAMR (Heat-assisted magnetic recording) or "Magnetic recording with heat assistance".

With the likelihood that only a few Gigas per inch will fit, 10 TB of data in the same space is extremely significant.

This is an increase of 10,000 times to the current technology, that is, if we currently have a 10TB HD, it is not so hard to believe in a supposed HD with 300TB that by mathematics would be something only 30 times bigger, or weird 100 PB (Petabytes ) of data comparing for the same reason.

Information and image (original) obtained at:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/186624-seagate-starts-shipping-8tb-hard-drives-with-10tb-and-hamr-on-the-horizon