Contrary to the predictions of many experts, who assured that in 2020 hard drives would end up being completely replaced by SSDs, the HDD not only continues to show its strength in the data center, but companies like Toshiba show that it is a field in which you can keep innovating.
If a few years ago the limit of conventional disks was 10TB and later, thanks to the use of helium, disks with more plates began to reach the market that allowed to increase that capacity to 16TB, now the Japanese company has just announced that is in a position to practically double that maximum capacity on its hard drives and promises a 26TB HDD by the end of this fiscal year (Spring 2023).
In the medium term, the plans of the Japanese company are more ambitious and, if its forecasts are met, by mid-2027 we could find ourselves with hard drives of more than 40TB, which of course could mean a revolution in the data center. But how did we get here?
MAMR: the new technology for the HDD
Until now it was considered that 16TB was the technological limit that could be offered in magnetic recording discs. This is because bit densities supporting capacities greater than 16TB would require much smaller write heads, but these cannot generate enough magnetic flux to invert the bits on the media.
To overcome this limit, it is necessary to inject additional (non-magnetic) energy, a principle known as magnetic assisted recording. Toshiba introduced its first generation of microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology in 2021, which uses a microwave-generating element to control and pool magnetic flux.
In this way, even smaller magnetic areas per bit are achieved and, as a result, higher densities, so that that year it was already able to offer capacities of 18TB. Now, in a new generation of its MAMR technology in combination with a larger magnetic surface and using more platters, it effectively hopes that those 26TB it promises will soon be a reality. Using this technology, the company further hopes that by mid-2025, it will be able to offer a 30TB hard drive.
HAMR: the road to 40TB
From here, the Asian multinational plans to go one step further and start using what is known as heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which is considered to be the one that will allow the storage capacity of hard drives to continue to evolve and that could allow us to see a 40TB HDD by 2027.
At this point it’s worth explaining that using technologies like MAMR requires Toshiba to switch to completely new platters, with new magnetic layers, not to mention new read and write heads. But the move to HAMR will require changing all the key components of the process again.
Given the ambitious transition on the horizon as well as the investment required to carry it out (not to mention the risks), it is to be expected that both MAMR and HAMR technologies will continue to coexist for a long time, even if HAMR end up becoming an established technology, by the middle of this decade.
