20TB hard drives are coming
Storage technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace.
In recent years, the rate at which the density – and therefore the capacity – of hard disks has improved has slowed considerably. Companies such as Seagate and Western Digital are of course continuing to ‘fit’ more and more gigabytes into their products (utilizing helium technology recently), but it is clear that things are not what they used to be.
One method that could lead to the manufacture of drives with even larger capacities is the use of glass instead of aluminum in the platters. This material is smoother and flatter than aluminum, which allows for space savings in a drive with more platters. In addition, it is less sensitive to heat than aluminum, and less energy is required to rotate a glass platter.
There are already drives on the market that utilize such technology, but the vast majority of them are 2.5″ models for laptops. But this will likely change soon, Nikkei argues, as manufacturers widely adopt this technology.
Japan’s Hoya has made prototypes of such platters with a thickness of just 0.381mm [the platters on most drives today are 0.635mm thick]. As you can see, this volume reduction can also make it easier to integrate more platters into each drive. In addition, glass substrates can also be used with HAMR [Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording] technology, which Seagate is already experimenting with. The goal is to release 20TB drives within the next few years! Not bad!
Plus SSDs have become quite cheap, and the speeds they offer are multiples of conventional mechanical drives. However, their capacity is, and will remain in the coming years, limited compared to that of similarly priced magnetic drives. No wonder HDD technology continues to evolve, with millions of dollars invested in research and development. At the rate the industry is progressing, after the arrival of the 20TB hard drives, it is possible that within the next decade we could have 500TB drives in our home systems.
You can continue reading about SSD drives here.
Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
