AMD and Intel team up on a new mobile chip, out in early 2018
Seagate has announced moves to extend 3.5in hard drive capacity to 20TB by 2020, using a technology that it’s been working on for almost 20 years.
The new drives will rely on heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which among other tricks places a laser on each grain-of-sand sized head for greater precision ( see p127).
According to the manufacturer, the technology is ready for the market and it will be shipping early drives to partners next year, although it hasn’t committed to a wider launch date, other than saying it expects the first HAMR drives to hit the market in “2018 or 2019 with capacity of around 16TB or greater”. The 20TB models will arrive in 2020.
The proposed 2018 launch is intending to wrestle the hard disk capacity title back off Western Digital’s current 14TB champion and highlights the different ways the two storage giants are addressing the issue of squeezing data into a limited space.
According to Seagate, its HAMR technology will reach 50TB early in the 2020s and could scale to 100TB. It works by super-heating the recording surface to 400˚C for a nanosecond while the head passes over.
Seagate claims it’s the only mid-term viable technology that will scale to future storage needs, but that’s something contested by Western Digital, which has ditched the HAMR production path in favour of Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording. Western Digital says that its technology is less volatile and could push disk drive capacity to 100TB by the 2030s.