Seagate to launch 20TB Hard Drives Using Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording
Even though SSDs are much faster than HDDs, Hard drives are still very relevant among the PC gaming community, offering an unmatched price-to-performance ratio. What's even interesting is that, when you consider that many games in your library, don't even really benefit from faster SSD (Solid State Drive).
Here, an HDD seems to be the most ideal approach to take the load off your SSD drives. Hard Disks may be slower, but they definitely provide larger storage at a very cheap price as compared to SSD.
According to a recent report released by Seagate, they have started business shipments of its hard drives including Heat-Assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology back in November, and also include an evaluation program for their dual-actuator system. This innovation by Seagate can provide twice the performance, as compared to a standard hard drive. Seagate is sure that its innovation will allow them to expand the capacity and the performance of its hard drives.
"We have a number of different 20TB platforms coming: PMR, SMR, HAMR," said Mosley. "There are a lot of different flavors of them, and they are targeted to different customers so different qualification schedules for each. We are very aggressive with the 20TB qualification"
HAMR Technology
The big problem with hard drives is the physical size and the maximum capacity of data they can hold. It can only take so much data. To solve this, Seagate is using Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, or HAMR. Although this was announced by Seagate in 2017, they recently revealed information about a 20TB drive using the same HAMR technology. This is what will allow the drive to store much more data, while being a similar size as a regular 3.5" drive.
However, that's not all. This technology allows a 3.5" drive to store upto 90 TB of data. The 20 TB HAMR hard disk uses nine 2.22-TB platters including areal compactness of around 1.3 Tb/inch2.
Future of Hard Drives
Seagate expects 30+ TB HDDs by the year 2023, up to 40 TB in 2024-2025, and over 50 TB by 2026. This was revealed at their recent event. In 2030, they are planning to manufacture and deliver 100 TB hard disks, with 120 TB units following it soon after. To hit these higher limits, Seagate is hoping to receive new varieties of media.
How much storage do we really need?
At this rate, where video games are as heavy as 100GB per title, we will definitely need more storage. Moreover, people these days tend to store movies, as well as TV shows on their computers. This stacks up to terabytes eventually. Not only that, with growing technology, such as huge mega-pixel counts in cameras, and even in smartphones, the file sizes are getting bigger. And people like to keep their media for years so that they can look back to their old memories. All of this requires more digital storage.
There are two main ways to really go about this change: get more storage, or build a powerful compression algorithm that can compress files by a good percent, while also allowing to read, and modify in real time. But that will of course require a much faster processor, so it's not suitable for an average consumer.
Conclusion
Seagate takes note that its 20TB hard drives actually can utilize its long-standing PMR technology, however, another HAMR design (Heat-assisted magnet recording) can store much more data. It's not yet finalized how much this new model will cost, the Seagate 10TB Barracuda Pro HDD with an MSRP of $349.99 gives a hint.
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