Maybe they're looking into it for a point some years down the line when both techs max out on their own and need to be combined into MHAMR drives to keep pushing capacities higher.
Nah, I'll wait for the Microwave Convection Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording drives. Hopefully they come with proper warning stickers, "Can't Touch This"
Honestly, throw a 512GB SSD buffer on the drive. The game will only load slow the first time.
I use caching programs at home, makes a huge difference and honestly it isn't that big of a deal to have the program load slow-ish once. 99% of the time I get SSD like performance out of my 2TB spinner that I've had a couple years now.
No problem. But they have to solve the problem of aligning all heads on an arm individually. With each head being able to transfer 200ish Mb/s times 16 and you are on ~ 3GB/s. Per arm. Dual arm gives you twice that while halving average access time AND giving you redundant path to the same data.
On top of that they just need some interchangeability - some way ordinary user can swap electronics on a drive for rescuing the data and they would make perfect long-term storage medium for mere mortals...
I can't find a cite, alas, but when I was much, much younger high-performance mainframe disc drives had multiple, radial actuators. which is to say, more than 2.
but, here's this (the wiki) about the IBM 3350: "The "x2F", as in Model A2F, unit is a normal x2 unit, but its two HDAs also have a Fixed Head area over the first five cylinders, thereby reducing[c] seek time to zero for these five cylinders."
I wish it talked more about Platter Density. The current ( I think ) is 1.5TB per platter, so first MAMR make the jump to 2TB per Platter. The projected density were 5TB per platter, hopefully we will reach there sooner as HDD is lacking any competitive advantage as NAND price are tumbling down.
Considering how expensive 8TB drives still are (even if you go the external drive shucking route), it'll be a good long time until anything I own breaks the 10TB barrier. Hopefully these developments will drive down prices, though.
They are mainly milking cloud corporations that dont care how expensive HDDs are. The end user has become irrelevant. But its good to see their stocks (Seagate and WD) dropping and dropping. Share holders are probably smelling the price fixing investigation coming up. Worked fine for too long already.
It's not your imagination. The absolute prices are not THAT bad (they fell a lot soon they were introduced, so they 're not what you might remember if you only looked at them at introduction) but yes, they have been amazingly flat. (8 extremely flat; 6 is falling, but always above the price of 8, I guess because some people are willing to pay more for non-shingled?)
I don't know if that just reflects never-ending demand from data warehouses?
It'd be interesting to see drives with two actuators with internal RAID. I'm not sure how the SATA interface would handle it, but making a proof of concept could be interesting.
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DanNeely - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
Maybe they're looking into it for a point some years down the line when both techs max out on their own and need to be combined into MHAMR drives to keep pushing capacities higher.darkswordsman17 - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
Nah, I'll wait for the Microwave Convection Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording drives. Hopefully they come with proper warning stickers, "Can't Touch This"eastcoast_pete - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
Since 20-40 GHz microwaves have mm wavelengths, WD can always market their MAMR drives as "5G drives" (: Take that, Seagate!Quite seriously, rollout of HAMR and MAMR drives is way overdue. Those 4K and upcoming 8K games and videos need space, and lot's of it.
darkswordsman17 - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
Ugh, I shudder to think about trying to load 8K games off spinning HDD.FunBunny2 - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
no problem. just have 128G on the motherboard. most folks can afford that. right?0ldman79 - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
Honestly, throw a 512GB SSD buffer on the drive. The game will only load slow the first time.I use caching programs at home, makes a huge difference and honestly it isn't that big of a deal to have the program load slow-ish once. 99% of the time I get SSD like performance out of my 2TB spinner that I've had a couple years now.
Brane2 - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
No problem. But they have to solve the problem of aligning all heads on an arm individually. With each head being able to transfer 200ish Mb/s times 16 and you are on ~ 3GB/s. Per arm. Dual arm gives you twice that while halving average access time AND giving you redundant path to the same data.On top of that they just need some interchangeability - some way ordinary user can swap electronics on a drive for rescuing the data and they would make perfect long-term storage medium for mere mortals...
rygaroo - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
16 independently moving arms?!? Yikes, that sounds like a nightmare both in terms of design difficulty and reliability, but if would be pretty cool.Brane2 - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
No. 16 micropiezo mechanisms just for minute corrrections of each head on the same arm...FunBunny2 - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
I can't find a cite, alas, but when I was much, much younger high-performance mainframe disc drives had multiple, radial actuators. which is to say, more than 2.but, here's this (the wiki) about the IBM 3350:
"The "x2F", as in Model A2F, unit is a normal x2 unit, but its two HDAs also have a Fixed Head area over the first five cylinders, thereby reducing[c] seek time to zero for these five cylinders."
Zok - Sunday, January 6, 2019 - link
Connor Peripherals (acquired by Seagate) made a dual-actuator drive back in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conner_PeripheralsFunBunny2 - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
here's a 1989 Seagate patent for tangential double arms. appears to be 3.5" drive.https://patents.google.com/patent/US5223993
Lord of the Bored - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
Faster than loading them off a disk that ISN'T spinning.(Solid state drives are not disks, hard or otherwise)
Lolimaster - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
HAMR is what? 3 years late and counting...Non-server grades HDD's are ticking bombs, I'm postponing 4x6TB drives...
Remember those promises for HAMR... 15TB-20TB 1st gen, 25-30TB soon after, 50-100TB the next 3 years...
prophet001 - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
This is just amazing.It's amazing.
Lolimaster - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
MARM is like Coffe Lake for Skylake, more of the same.iwod - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
I wish it talked more about Platter Density. The current ( I think ) is 1.5TB per platter, so first MAMR make the jump to 2TB per Platter. The projected density were 5TB per platter, hopefully we will reach there sooner as HDD is lacking any competitive advantage as NAND price are tumbling down.Valantar - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
Considering how expensive 8TB drives still are (even if you go the external drive shucking route), it'll be a good long time until anything I own breaks the 10TB barrier. Hopefully these developments will drive down prices, though.shabby - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
Is it me or is the size increases of hard drives getting smaller? Are they going to milk us every 2tb's?Beaver M. - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
They are mainly milking cloud corporations that dont care how expensive HDDs are.The end user has become irrelevant.
But its good to see their stocks (Seagate and WD) dropping and dropping. Share holders are probably smelling the price fixing investigation coming up. Worked fine for too long already.
jabber - Sunday, January 6, 2019 - link
I'll take a single platter 4TB version of that tech.Xajel - Sunday, January 6, 2019 - link
And we're still waiting for 6~8TB+ HDD's prices to fall down. The prices seems stuck for longer than I remember for previous generations.name99 - Sunday, January 6, 2019 - link
It's not your imagination. The absolute prices are not THAT bad (they fell a lot soon they were introduced, so they 're not what you might remember if you only looked at them at introduction) but yes, they have been amazingly flat. (8 extremely flat; 6 is falling, but always above the price of 8, I guess because some people are willing to pay more for non-shingled?)I don't know if that just reflects never-ending demand from data warehouses?
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https://camelcamelcamel.com/Seagate-Archive-6GBps-...
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https://camelcamelcamel.com/Red-6TB-NAS-Hard-Drive...
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tommo1982 - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
It'd be interesting to see drives with two actuators with internal RAID. I'm not sure how the SATA interface would handle it, but making a proof of concept could be interesting.tommo1982 - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
What are those 6 pins on the right for? I see SATA/SAS connection on the left, but I never saw an HDD with extra pins.