On this podcast, Antony Adshead is joined by Jason Feist, senior vice-president for advertising in merchandise and markets at Seagate, to have a look at how spinning disk can get to 40TB and 50TB.
We speak about arduous disk drive applied sciences comparable to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that may increase areal density and pack extra information onto disk platters.
Feist additionally talks about the way forward for arduous disk drives (HDDs) and the use circumstances suited to them.
So, we’ve reached the low to mid-20s in terabyte (TB) phrases in arduous disk drives. How are HDD makers going to push capability past what we’ve acquired at the moment?
Nice query. Thanks for the time this morning. It’s simply an incredible time to be a part of the arduous drive trade. It’s transformative, it’s disruptive, and with all the markets beginning to rebound, it’s a good time to innovate and supply the power to have information storage gadgets at scale.
The improvements which are underway proper now are pushed by a variety of contributions throughout many various disciplines. We’ve nice engineers working in our provide chain to permit us to have mechanical improvements, to have recording physics improvements with magnetic recording, and to place extra data on each disk inside a tough drive.
And we’ve superb wafer and media metrology underway to proceed to enhance our course of management, our repeatability and our skill to extract extra areal density out of each drive. Areal density is basically what’s on the forefront of improvement for arduous drives.
It has been for years and can proceed to be for years to come back, and there’s a lot of new methods and new processes that we’ve entry to, with applied sciences that are actually changing into extra available.
[These include] higher simulation, extra use of GPUs [graphics processing units] to do issues with synthetic intelligence [AI] to permit us to search out design areas that we didn’t have entry to earlier than with pace, and all that creates a recipe that our engineers are profiting from and permitting us to convey bigger and bigger capability drives to our clients.
Given these improvements and skills to analysis in new methods, what capacities can we count on within the subsequent 5 years and what improvements particularly are going to drive these?
Properly, it’s been an thrilling yr. We’ve seen the arduous drive trade convey forth 28TB arduous drives and we’ve seen Seagate ship 3TB per platter samples to the trade. That’s one thing I’m very happy with, and I feel as an trade we’ll proceed to drive that areal density in that terabyte per disk improve. We’ll see supply of 4TB per disk and 5TB per disk within the not too distant future.
All of that served on a 10-disk arduous disk drive itself, so delivering 40TB and 50TB disk drives within the close to future. Actually, actually thrilling. The premise for these capability will increase are actually pushed by heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) innovation.
It’s been a big space of focus, analysis, funding and improvement over the past 15 to twenty years. Simply as perpendicular recording had served the arduous drive trade for the final 20 years, we consider that HAMR will serve the trade for years to come back. So, very, very thrilling.
All of this actually comes on the proper time, within the sense that cloud storage demand is rising and using cloud continues to develop. So, the demand curve actually helps us proceed to remain targeted on that innovation and ensure we’re delivering bigger arduous drives to satisfy that use case.
How lengthy ought to we count on spinning disk arduous drives to be round for and what workloads are going to be most applicable for them within the coming 5 to 10 years? I suppose additionally the query there may be, what’s the limitation on capability growth?
It is a query that we get requested routinely. It’s one which we’ve a variety of enjoyable answering within the sense that we work very carefully with the biggest clients on the earth and we’ve a various set of consumers.
We’ve massive cloud corporations, massive enterprise corporations. We’ve a client enterprise. We’ve a video and knowledge and analytics enterprise. All of those routes to market are barely completely different and so they all have the necessity for rising information storage.
It’s thrilling and the brand new use circumstances that you simply hear loads about, comparable to AI, are including gasoline to that fireside. It’s thrilling. It exhibits the significance and the relevance of knowledge on making choices and making a society that’s knowledgeable and has information at their fingertips. So, with that, arduous drives are going to be right here for a lot of, a few years to come back.
The innovation is underway now and also you’re going to see a big transformation in how massive capability drives are used and the way clouds reap the benefits of these economies of scale.
You possibly can see new companies relying on arduous drives for his or her ecosystem improvement. [This includes] advert spending, social media corporations and the expansion of video are all very effectively suited to what arduous drives present: very massive capability, sustained information charge transfers, environment friendly sustainable storage architectures, scalable architectures that enable us to have presence in a number of geographies across the globe.
[And] there are new use circumstances with all of those video purposes for prosumers and content material creators, which are actually profiting from instruments with generative AI to do text-to-video and creating bigger, richer content material at the next charge.
All these issues are good for information storage and HDDs have been, and proceed to be, the spine of knowledge storage wants at exabyte scale.
