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WD Announces Storage Breakthrough: MAMR

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

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....and eventually exceed the speed of today's 3.5" platter drives.
 
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BFG10K said:
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.
Click to expand...
Looking forward to a 20TB Ultrastar He20.
Dual 320TB servers here I come! 😀
 
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.
 
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Elixer said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
fleshconsumed said:
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.
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It is 4Tb/in^2.
density-1.png

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.
Click to expand...
 
fleshconsumed said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
fleshconsumed said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.

density-1.png
 
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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.
 
Beer4Me said:
The article makes no mention of performance scaling alongside the massive storage capability increase.
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Elixer said:
SATA Express might make a comeback with these, those can use 2 PCIe 3 lanes and that gets us to 2GB/s.
Click to expand...

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?
 
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BFG10K said:
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.
Click to expand...

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)
 
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