Data Storage field is going to witness a new evolution with the arrival of 15TB and 50TB hard drives by next year. At the Ceatec Trade show in Japan last week, TDK which is a well known hard drive maker demonstrated to the world its new prodigy of hard drives which work on Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.
The company also made an official announcement that with the help of HAMR it will come up with 15TB hard drives by the mid next year.
Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) magnetically records data on high stability media using laser thermal assistance to first heat the material, which allows in greatly reducing the size of pitches without negative effects on reading and writing abilities. As a result of this technology, hard drives can store vast amounts of data on the available platters through perpendicular recording technique.
Previously, it was believed that HAMR will only become viable sometime in 2017. But companies like TDK, Seagate and Western Digital intensified their HAMR development to such an extent that hard drives based on this technology will turn into a reality soon.
In the meantime, Western Digital made an official announcement recently saying that it will start producing 30TB and 50TB hard drives by 2017. Well, initially these drives will be expensive and so will be targeted at companies running data servers. But eventually home based consumers can also afford them as supply surpasses the demand.
William Cain, Vice President of WD added that his company is planning to increase the capacity of a hard drive by decreasing the size of the bits that hold the data on the disk. The company will take the help of HAMR in order to weed out the challenges met in these environments. He added that the foremost challenge will be faced after the decrease in the size of the bits. With the reduction in size of the bits, the ability to write data diminishes. This is where HAMR comes to rescue, as it allows writing more data in the same amount of surface because the disk is heated using lasers during the writing process.
Well, as of now, everything seems to be innovative in this segment. But the question over here which pops up instantly into the mind is how well this technology will help in dealing with the write speed.
Few storage technologists who are following the trends have already branded HAMR as a good innovation to obtain increased storage capacities on hard drives. But at the same time, they are sure that this technology many not assist in increasing the access (R/W) speeds on these drives.
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