Hard disk platter density improvements have plateaued?

[mikeymikec]

It seems to me that, in short, hard disks have stopped getting bigger. Does anyone else find this a bit odd? Notebook disks have peaked at 1TB capacity, Desktop disks at 4TB.

While I agree that (in terms of mainstream usage) hard disks will soon be replaced by SSDs, there are markets where storage capacity is eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and with data storage being part of the bread and butter for many businesses (and governments), I would have thought that platter densities would still be increasing.

The other thing I find a bit surprising is that I would have thought that Seagate and WD would be trying somewhat harder to make sure that people think of their names first when considering SSD (or SSD hybrid) choices. The only reason why I can think of them being a bit slow on the uptake is that the flood probably depleted their coffers somewhat.

 

[imagoon]

Capacity of the drives is not directly related to platter densities really. Once the drives hit a certain capacity, they start doing things like reducing the platter counts while keeping the capacity the same until there is a market need for more capacity. I think Seagate was talking about 1,800gb / in^2 not to long ago. That is about 225GB / in^2. That could get you pretty close to the 1TB disk on a single platter in a laptop form factor. They can then make that in to a dual platter and give you 3TB.

 

[86waterpumper]

There are 2.5 drives larger than 1tb there are 2tb ones out they are just thicker than the 1tb are. Some notebooks that will work in, some it will not. To me, these are more useful drives for external enclosures (usb powered only) such as the wd passport drives, & small form factor desktop/vesa mount cases rather than laptop/ultrabooks.

Seagate is being fairly aggressive I think in the ssd market. I recently purchased a 480gb ssd seagate drive myself. These are impressive drives for the money. I agree wd is lagging on that, and it is obviously true that development has slowed down on platter density and spindle drives in general. I think a good bit of internal improvements are made in bearing technology we don't read about though. A 7200 rpm drive from today is virtually silent compared to one from just a few years ago. They have also tweaked caches and buffers and whatever else and the density has helped the modern 5400/5900 drives exceed performance of the old 7200. Still, I had figured by now everything other than green type drives would be 10,000 rpm like the old raptors were...
those were pretty reliable right and some of them 2.5" form factor even. It would be nice to actually be able to trust modern drives no matter the capacity...for the manufacturers to work on the reliability that would be something new eh? 😛

 

[Haserath]

The flood generally increased their profits. Seagate was hardly affected, but increased prices along with the market. WD lost a lot of shipments but still made money thanks to pricing.

Hard drive technology has plateaued. They don't have any other ways of increasing areal density atm.

Heat assissted magnetic recording has been in developement, but it's not ready.
They will be moving on to Helium drives for more platters per drive and Shingled Magnetic Recording for higher density(not along the angular momentum meaning no increase in sequential read/write speed).

Maybe the manufacturers know the HDD is down for the count. SSD's didn't become popular until late 2000, and the improvements practically stopped there.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Yes, it seems that we've hit another density wall. We've hit one at 83GB/platter before the advent of perpendicular recording. The first Seagate perpendicular recording drive took the capacity to 133GB/platter and carried us all the way to 1TB/platter, but it seems that this is it. Even the newly announced 6TB Hitachi helium drives are <1TB/platter (possibly 1TB cut down in size). Seagate is playing with Shingled recording but from what I understand it's actually detrimental to performance, so... Right now I think we're stuck...

 

[Elixer]

HAMR looks to be the way things are headed, and they expect 4 or 5 terabits per square inch. That is about 5x as much as today's drives.

 

[Morbus]

I read a while ago that Seagate were predicting to achieve 64TB hard drives in 10 years time... We might have plateaued of course, but that doesn't mean there's no way forward.