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HGST To Debut 10TB HD
HGST has revealed the world’s first 10TB hard drive, but you probably won’t be installing one anytime soon.
The company has been working on the 10TB SMR HelioSeal hard drive for months and now it is almost ready to hit the market.
The drive uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to boost density, thus enabling HGST to cram more data on every platter. ZDnet got a quick peek at the drive at a Linux event in Boston, which also featured a burning effigy of Nick Farrell.
Although we’ve covered some SMR drives in the past, the technology is still not very mature and so far it’s been limited to niche drives and enterprise designs, not consumer hard drives. HGST’s new drive is no exception – it is designed for data centers rather than PCs. While you won’t use it to store your music and video, you might end up streaming them from one of these babies.
Although data centres are slowly turning to SSDs for many hosts, even on cheap shared hosting packages, there is still a need for affordable mechanical storage. Even when hard drives are completely phased out from the frontline, they still have a role to play as backup drives.
HGST Buys Amplidata
HGST announced the acquisition of Belgian software-defined storage provider Amplidata.
Amplidata has been instrumental in HGST’s Active Archive elastic storage solution unveiled at the company’s Big Bang event last September in San Francisco.
Use of Amplidata’s Himalaya distributed storage system, combined with HGST’s unique Helium filled drives, creates systems that can store 10 petabytes on a single rack, designed for cold storage literally and figuratively.
Dave Tang, senior vice president and general manager of HGST’s Elastic Storage Platforms Group, said “Software-defined storage solutions are essential to scale-out storage of the type we unveiled in September. The software is vital to ensuring the durability and scalability of systems.”
Steve Milligan, president and chief executive of Western Digital, added: “We have had an ongoing strategic relationship with Amplidata that included investment from Western Digital Capital and subsequent joint development activity.
“Amplidata has deep technical expertise, an innovative spirit, and valuable intellectual property in this fast-growing market space.
“The acquisition will support our strategic growth initiatives and broaden the scope of opportunity for HGST in cloud data centre storage infrastructure.”
The acquisition is expected to be completed in the first quarter of the year. No financial terms were disclosed.
Amplidata will ultimately be incorporated into the HGST Elastic Storage Platforms Group, a recognition of the fact that every piece of hardware is, in part, software.
Mike Cordano, president of HGST, said at last year’s Big Bang event: “We laugh when we hear that we’re a hardware company. People don’t realise there’s over a million lines of code in that drive. That’s what the firmware is.
“What we’re starting to do now is add software to that and, along with the speed of the PCI-e interface, that makes a much bigger value proposition.”
HGST Goes Self-Assembling Molecules
HGST has announced that it has developed self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting to potentially double data density in hard disk drives.
HGST used to be known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies before Western Digital bought it, and has been working on lithography techniques to boost data density on hard disk platters. Now the firm has announced that it has been able to create patterns of magnetic islands that are 10nm wide, doubling present state of the art data density.
HGST Fellow Tom Albrecht described the self-assembling molecules as block copolymers that are made of segments that repel each other to create segments that are lined up in rows, and said that lab tests show promising read/write performance and data retention. The firm claims it has combined self-assembling molecules, line doubling and nanoimprinting down to the 10nm scale in a circular arrangement.
Albrecht said, “We made our ultra-small features without using any conventional photolithography. With the proper chemistry and surface preparations, we believe this work is extendable to ever-smaller dimensions.”
HGST said self-assembling patterning and nanoimprinting can result in 1.2 trillion dots per inch, which it claims is twice the density of existing hard disk drives. According to the firm, its engineers have been able to create segments only 50 atoms wide.
Although HGST showed off the technology this week at the SPIE Advanced Lithography 2013 conference, the firm said it expects the technology to be cost effective by the end of the decade, that is if solid-state disk drives haven’t eliminated the need for hard disk drives by then.