HDDs for the current and next decade.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24650125

Because nothing says “fun” quite like having to restore a RAID that just saw 140TB fail.

Western Digital this week outlined its near-term and mid-term plans to increase hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era. In addition, the company outlined its longer-term vision for hard disk drives’ evolution that includes a new laser technology for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), new platters with higher areal density, and HDD assemblies with up to 14 platters. As a result, WD will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.

Western Digital plans to volume produce its inaugural commercial hard drives featuring HAMR technology next year, with capacities rising from 40TB (CMR) or 44TB (SMR) in late 2026, with production ramping in 2027. These drives will use the company’s proven 11-platter platform with high-density media as well as HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy (FePt) on top of platters to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity before writing data.

  • Alpha71@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    18 hours ago

    Okay. I want total honesty here. How many of you could actually fill that thing up?

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      8 hours ago

      No sweat, try mirroring a private tracker and you’ll very quickly run out lol. You need a couple of petabytes worth.

      The real problem is the price of HDDs not going down due to lower production in light of SSDs.

      I fully expect WD to drop this as some stupidly expensive SAS drives that almost no consumer will buy. They should at least apply the dual heads for speed tech so we get faster HDDs for the same price.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      16 hours ago

      I remember Mac OS X having an issue with its mail app awhile back that would create massive log files continuously that would keep generating until they filled the entire drive. You would have to boot to a recovery partition or such because the OS partition wouldn’t have enough room to expand/boot and remove them and fix the issue.

      Imagine having 130 terabytes of invisible log files