Microwave breakthrough helps boost hard drive sizes to 40TB+

[Arthur]

It's good to see HDDs catching up with SSDs in terms of capacity.

 

Sources: Western Digital (via AnandTech, BBC News)

 

The data-storing abilities of hard drives could soon swell to 40 terabytes (TB) and beyond, says Western Digital.

 

Currently the largest hard disk drive (HDD) that stores data on spinning disks can hold about 14TB of information.

 

Western Digital said the bigger drives were made possible by finding a way to use microwaves to write data on 3.5in drives.

 

The first bigger-capacity drives should go on sale in 2019.

 

Yesterday, Western Digital announced a breakthrough in microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) that completely took the storage industry by surprise. The takeaway was that Western Digital would be using MAMR instead of HAMR for driving up hard drive capacities over the next decade. Before going into the specifics, it is beneficial to have some background on the motivation behind MAMR.

 

​Hard drives may be on the way out for client computing systems, but, they will continue to be the storage media of choice for datacenters. The Storage Networking Industry Association has the best resources for identifying trends in the hard drive industry. As recently as last year, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) was expected to be the technology update responsible for increasing hard drive capacities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 14, 2017 by Arthur