WD Announces Storage Breakthrough: MAMR

[BFG10K]

Uses a microwave field for writing. Didn't see this tech becoming viable so quickly.

Looks like it has a number of advantages over HAMR, including easy integration with existing materials, technology, and manufacturing.

https://www.pcper.com/news/Storage/Western-Digital-MAMR-Tech-Pushes-Future-HDDs-Beyond-40TB

 

[cbn]

If that ends up being true then 2.5" HDD will be around for some time.....

....and eventually exceed the speed of today's 3.5" platter drives.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Cool! I could use some 40TB HDDs, in a few years. Amazing!

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

As long as it is not the crapsh*w that is SMR, I'm all for it!

 

[BFG10K]

As long as it is not the crapsh*w that is SMR, I'm all for it!

MAMR appears to be orthogonal which means it can be attached to any existing HDD tech (e.g. PMR, SMR, Helium, etc). So WD can put it anywhere into their portfolio.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

MAMR appears to be orthogonal which means it can be attached to any existing HDD tech (e.g. PMR, SMR, Helium, etc). So WD can put it anywhere into their portfolio.

Looking forward to a 20TB Ultrastar He20.
Dual 320TB servers here I come!

 

[Elixer]

I wonder what microwave frequency range they will be using?
I'd also think they would have to have a new interface. SATA just won't cut it for these beasts.
It would take way too long to rebuild a RAID array if one of these dies.
SATA Express might make a comeback with these, those can use 2 PCIe 3 lanes and that gets us to 2GB/s.
Highly doubt they would use USB 3(+), and there is a small chance they would use Thunderbolt 2/3, so... hmm.

 

[fleshconsumed]

I wonder what microwave frequency range they will be using?
I'd also think they would have to have a new interface. SATA just won't cut it for these beasts.
It would take way too long to rebuild a RAID array if one of these dies.
SATA Express might make a comeback with these, those can use 2 PCIe 3 lanes and that gets us to 2GB/s.
Highly doubt they would use USB 3(+), and there is a small chance they would use Thunderbolt 2/3, so... hmm.

Eh, even the fastest consumer drives of today can only do around 200Mbytes/s sequential read best case scenario. Assuming the density nearly triples as the slides indicate from 1.4GB/in^2 to 4GB/in^2 with corresponding linear increase in sequential speeds, it would still be under 600MB/s limit of SATA3. Enterprise 10k/15k drives could potentially break that limit, but they already have 12Gbps SAS so no problem there either.

 

[Elixer]

Eh, even the fastest consumer drives of today can only do around 200Mbytes/s sequential read best case scenario. Assuming the density nearly triples as the slides indicate from 1.4GB/in^2 to 4GB/in^2 with corresponding linear increase in sequential speeds, it would still be under 600MB/s limit of SATA3. Enterprise 10k/15k drives could potentially break that limit, but they already have 12Gbps SAS so no problem there either.

It is 4Tb/in^2.

and,

WD currently sits somewhere around 400 tracks per inch (TPI), but they hope to reach 1 million (!) thanks to this new tracking combined with MAMR and improved media chemistry.

 

[fleshconsumed]

It is 4Tb/in^2.

and,

OK, I messed up my numbers, it's going up from 1,400Gb/in2 or 1.4Tb/in2 to 4Tb/in2, that is still only a 3-fold increase.

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

OK, I messed up my numbers, it's going up from 1,400Gb/in2 or 1.4Tb/in2 to 4Tb/in2, that is still only a 3-fold increase.

Which would definitely saturate SATA III. Current 7,200RPM drives do about 250MB/s max on sequential access. Multiply that by 2.85 and you get 712MB/s which is well over the ~550MB/s SATA III can actually do.

 

[cbn]

Eh, even the fastest consumer drives of today can only do around 200Mbytes/s sequential read best case scenario. Assuming the density nearly triples as the slides indicate from 1.4GB/in^2 to 4GB/in^2 with corresponding linear increase in sequential speeds, it would still be under 600MB/s limit of SATA3. Enterprise 10k/15k drives could potentially break that limit, but they already have 12Gbps SAS so no problem there either.

Today's fastest Helium drives (~250 MB/s) use PMR platters with areal density less than 1.4Tb/in2. (1.4Tb/in2 figure is actually the projected areal density of SMR sometime in the future.)

In fact, the spec sheet on the 12TB HGST He12 3.5" drive has the platters listed at 864 Gbits/in2.

 

[BFG10K]

I wonder what microwave frequency range they will be using?

20-40 GHz according to the articles.

 

[Yakk]

Cool! I could use some 40TB HDDs, in a few years. Amazing!

Actually, with all the 4K video I'm going through, I could use some right now in my NAS!

 

[Beer4Me]

Other than the consumer data space or for cold data storage, this isn't something I would want to see in the Enterprise space. The article makes no mention of performance scaling alongside the massive storage capability increase. I mean, my god, a backup/restore of data so large over traditional SAS/SATA backplane on a 7200 or even 10k rpm disk would take weeks.

 

[BFG10K]

The article makes no mention of performance scaling alongside the massive storage capability increase.

Sequential performance is directly tied to areal density so they should automatically get faster as the capacity increases. So unless all of your files are 4K, you'll see a definite benefit in file copying.

I mean, my god, a backup/restore of data so large over traditional SAS/SATA backplane on a 7200 or even 10k rpm disk would take weeks.

The first time yes, but the nice thing about something like Robocopy is that you can do incremental backups thereafter. I backup a total data-set of approx 300GB daily and it takes about two minutes on my 5400RPM USB3 external drive. My VelociRaptor does it even faster.

Speaking of which, it'd be awesome to get a 2.5" 15K MAMR Raptor.

 

[cbn]

SATA Express might make a comeback with these, those can use 2 PCIe 3 lanes and that gets us to 2GB/s.

Could it be the SATA Express Hard drive with MAMR platters would use the two SATA connections instead, then maybe the PCIe x 2 gets connected to some Non-Volatile memory (on the hard drive) simultaneously? (ie, all three connectors of SATA Express get used for a MAMR SSHD)

If this was possible then I'm thinking perhaps the SATA Express hard drive could also be used with a single SATA port as well? This with reduced speed (and without the benefit of the Non-Volatile memory).

Alternatively, Do hard drives eventually become NVME using PCIe x 2? (ie, the SATA gets dropped) Is NVME possible with spinning platters?

 

[William Gaatjes]

I have been reading the article.
When reading it, it seems so easy.
What an ingenuity. Amazing.

 

[cbn]

MAMR appears to be orthogonal which means it can be attached to any existing HDD tech (e.g. PMR, SMR, Helium, etc). So WD can put it anywhere into their portfolio.

Since you mention MAMR appears to be orthogonal, I do wonder if SMR (stacked with MAMR) is going to be the way forward across all levels of HDD, even the client ones?

See link below for some examples of everyday client drives now using SMR:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-consumer-hard-drives-have-smr-platters.2525313/

Maybe an exception would be SAS? (Enterprise)