BPMR | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Wed, 09 Sep 2015 19:56:35 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png BPMR | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 Seagate: We shipped four million SMR HDDs, happy with SMR tech https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-we-shipped-four-million-smr-hdds-happy-with-smr-tech/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-we-shipped-four-million-smr-hdds-happy-with-smr-tech/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2015 19:55:36 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=266970 Seagate Technology has been shipping hard disk drives based on media featuring shingled magnetic recording technology for about two years now, but so far the company has not shipped a lot of such drives. Nonetheless, Seagate seems to be happy with SMR and plans to expand shipments of SMR-based hard drives in the coming quarters. …

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Seagate Technology has been shipping hard disk drives based on media featuring shingled magnetic recording technology for about two years now, but so far the company has not shipped a lot of such drives. Nonetheless, Seagate seems to be happy with SMR and plans to expand shipments of SMR-based hard drives in the coming quarters.

Shingled magnetic recording increases areal density of HDD media by about 25 per cent by writing data on overlapping magnetic tracks compared to media based on perpendicular magnetic recording. The overlapping tracks may slow down the recording process since writing to one track overwrites adjacent tracks, and requires them to be rewritten. In a bid to compensate lower writing performance of SMR-based hard drives, HDD makers have to tune firmware in a bid to maximize sequential writes to certain regions of the drive. Alternatively, operating systems or software should to “recognize” storage with SMR and only write sequentially to certain sectors.

seagate_archive_hdd

In general, hard drives featuring SMR media are slower than HDDs featuring perpendicular magnetic recording technology and therefore datacentres, which adopt them in a bid to increase storage capacities, have to tune their software, which is why sales of such drives have so far been slow. Nonetheless, before TDMR [two-dimensional magnetic recording] and HAMR [heat-assisted magnetic recording] arrive later this decade, SMR will be used to increase areal densities and capacities of HDDs. Moreover, Seagate has learnt how to hide disadvantages of SMR drives in a datacentre.

“We have shipped about four million of ‘shingled’ drives,” said Dave Mosley, president of operations and technology at Seagate, during the company’s analyst and investor strategic update earlier this month. “We view this as a very successful achievement because we have learnt a ton about our customers’ applications. We are ready to hide ‘shingled’ behind tiers and caches so that […] [our customers] don’t have to make tough changes to their software.”

seagate_hdd_barracuda_black

Seagate is working with its customers who want to tune their applications for SMR storage, but it is also adjusting its firmware to speed up such HDDs for cases, where changes to the apps are too complex or impossible.

“We are very happy with the progress that we have made [with SMR hard disk drives], we are shipping [shingled HDDs] for different platforms and are ready to get big enough in 2016,” said Mr. Mosley.

In addition to server-class hard disk drives, Seagate plans to use SMR for high-capacity client storage solutions. Keeping in mind that apps for client PCs will not change overnight, Seagate has to hide lower write performance of shingled magnetic recording by adjusting firmware of its products.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It looks like Seagate has big plans for shingled magnetic recording. While so far sales of SMR-based HDDs have been pretty low, in the future the company will increase their shipments.

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Seagate demos HAMR HDDs, vows to start shipments in 2017 https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-demos-hamr-hdds-vows-to-start-commercial-shipments-in-late-2017/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-demos-hamr-hdds-vows-to-start-commercial-shipments-in-late-2017/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2015 20:02:00 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=256418 Seagate Technology this week demonstrated a NAS packed with hard disk drives that use heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. While the company claims that the NAS worked flawlessly, Seagate again reconsidered the launch timeframe for its HAMR HDDs and delayed them to 2017 – 2018. Nonetheless, the company is already working on heated-dot magnetic recording …

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Seagate Technology this week demonstrated a NAS packed with hard disk drives that use heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. While the company claims that the NAS worked flawlessly, Seagate again reconsidered the launch timeframe for its HAMR HDDs and delayed them to 2017 – 2018. Nonetheless, the company is already working on heated-dot magnetic recording (HDMR) tech, which will enable 100TB+ drives a decade from now.

Seagate shows off NAS with HAMR-based HDDs

At the IEEE International Magnetics Conference (InterMag), Seagate demonstrated its Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS that fits eight hot-swappable 3.5” drives with Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface and is powered by a dual-core Intel Atom processor for storage applications as well as Seagate NAS OS (which is a custom embedded Linux). The NAS was loaded with eight hard disk drives featuring HAMR platters, which worked in a RAID configuration. Seagate ran a mixture of videos, and also recorded a live camera stream.

“The system worked perfectly, it ran continuously for three days, and was another powerful milestone in our journey to ship HAMR drives to select customers by 2017, with full production in 2018,” wrote Mark Re, chief technology officer at Seagate, in a blog post.

seagate_nas

Seagate did not disclose any details about the HAMR-based hard drives. What we do know about them is that they use industry-standard Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface and can work with modern network area storage devices, which means that their power consumption and heat dissipation is comparable to those of today’s HDDs. The company already has appropriate electronics (e.g., controller chips, firmware, etc.), motors, read/write heads and other hardware necessary to build HAMR-based drives. Moreover, the demonstration shows that Seagate’s HAMR hard disks are already compatible with the company’s software. Finally, the drives not only work, but can be actually used for demanding workloads.

HAMR: The enabler for 40TB – 50TB hard disk drives

Modern leading-edge hard disk drives can store up to 10TB of data on seven 1.43TB platters with ~0.95Tbpsi (Terra-bit per square inch) areal density. Many believe that 1Tbpsi is the limit for perpendicular magnetic recording and shingled magnetic recording technologies used today, but Seagate’s recently introduced 4TB 2.5” hard drive actually features slightly higher areal density of around 1.056Tbpsi.

seagate_nas_hdd_3

Capacities of contemporary hard disk drives are – among other things – constrained by the areal density. The latter is constrained by the physical size of “pitches” on hard disk drives media required to store a single bit of information. Nowadays the pitches are already very small and if they are made considerably smaller – to cram more pitches on a standard disk platter – it will be impossible to write data into them because it is not possible to produce a more powerful magnetic field in the smaller space using current technologies. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology magnetically records data on high-stability media (such as iron platinum alloy) with laser thermal assistance to heat the material and reduce its coercivity for a short amount of time required to write one bit. HAMR allows to significantly reduce the size of “pitches” without negative effects on read-ability, write-ability and stability. Hard drives with HAMR technology will feature considerably higher bit densities and will therefore store more data than today’s hard HDDs featuring perpendicular recording tech.

Industry experts believe that HAMR – or TAMR [thermally-assisted magnetic recording] – will help to increase areal density of magnetic platters to 2Tbpsi in the coming years and then to up to 4Tbpsi or even 5Tbpsi. Such areal densities will enable enterprise-class six-platter hard drives with capacities of 40TB or 50TB as well as 25TB – 32TB consumer-class HDDs.

Availability of HAMR

Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu as well as other makers of hard drives, HDD platters and HDD heads have demonstrated prototype drives with HAMR for a number of times in the recent years and revealed different timeframes of their commercial availability. For example, last year TDK predicted that HAMR drives would debut in 2015, whereas Seagate anticipated to start shipments of HAMR HDDs in 2016 – 2017.

wdc_caviar_black_hdd_3_550

As it appears, Seagate is now more conservative regarding volume shipments of drives with HAMR technology than it used to be. The company promises to ship HAMR drives to select customers in 2017 and enter full production in 2018. Typically, it means that Seagate plans to use HAMR for select enterprise-class models first and may not even sell such drives to all clients. Starting 2018, the company will begin to mass produce HAMR-based drives for certain mass market segments, but it remains to be seen when such HDDs reach mainstream price-points.

Beyond HAMR

HAMR is not the pinnacle of hard disk drive evolution. Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, last year demonstrated a roadmap describing the evolution of hard disk drives going forward. The roadmap covers multiple magnetic recording technologies and spans to 2025 and beyond.

astc_technology_roadmap

At InterMag Seagate also presented a new paper that discussed a new technology called “heated-dot magnetic recording,” or HDMR, that should enable areal densities up to 10Tbpsi. HDMR combines the techniques used in HAMR with bit-patterned media and, possibly, two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).

Thanks to storage media with 10Tbpsi areal densities, it will be possible to build 100TB+ hard drives a little more than 10 years from now.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It is obvious that hard disk drives featuring HAMR technology will be available later this decade. However, it is also clear that it is taking a longer time to transit to a new type of magnetic media than it used to before. Is it a local problem with thermally-assisted magnetic recording and the evolution of HDDs will continue at a rapid pace once all the challenges get resolved? Or the hard drive evolution is getting generally slower from now on because of slower migration to newer magnetic recording technologies? Only time will tell.

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Industry consortium predicts 100TB hard drives in 2025 https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/industry-consortium-predicts-100tb-hard-drives-in-2025/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/industry-consortium-predicts-100tb-hard-drives-in-2025/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:28:10 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=223538 At the recent Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) conference Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, demonstrated a new HDD roadmap. Apparently, rapid increases in areal density of hard drive media will allow HDD makers to create hard drives with up to …

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At the recent Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) conference Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, demonstrated a new HDD roadmap. Apparently, rapid increases in areal density of hard drive media will allow HDD makers to create hard drives with up to 100TB capacity by 2025.

Modern hard drives use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology which once enabled a rapid HDD capacity boost, but is no longer quickly evolving. It is also believed that shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology will not bring a lot of capacity benefits to hard drives as well, according to the roadmap. Members of ASTC believe that the next big thing in hard disk drives is heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which will be massively introduced into HDDs by 2017, increasing the average annual areal density growth rate to 30% (it is currently about 15%), reports Forbes.

astc_technology_roadmap

At present advanced hard drive media features 0.86Tbpsi (Terra-bit per square inch) areal density. HAMR technology is projected to increase it to 2Tbpsi – 4Tbpsi in the coming years, thus significantly increasing capacities of hard drives to 20TB+ in the next five years.

Sometimes in 2021 the industry is expected to migrate to bit pattern media (with the magnetic media broken into small regions on the disk surface) combined with an extension to SMR called two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).

Eventually bit pattern media with TMDR will be combined with HAMR – which will be called heated-dot magnetic recording, or HDMR – boosting areal densities to 10Tbpsi by 2025. Thanks to storage media with 10Tbpsi areal densities, it will be possible to build 100TB+ hard drives a little more than 10 years from now.

While solid-state storage is rapidly catching up with hard disk drives in terms of capacity these days, it remains to be seen whether companies like Intel, Samsung, Toshiba or Micron will be able to continue to keep the pace once HAMR and BPMR technologies enter the market.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Looks like hard drives will continue to be used as primary storage devices for huge amounts of data for at least another decade…

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