Seagate pushes HAMR as next big thing

Seagate is bigging up HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) as the replacement to take us beyond the disk capacity limits of current PMR technology. PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) involves the magnetisation of tiny bits of magnetic material, made up of grains, oriented vertically in the recording medium. As the size …

[Dick Emery]

Meh

They need to concentrate on moving away from moving parts. Hard disks are more likely to go wrong and more power hungry simply because they have moving parts. They need to throw more r&d into solid state.

[Alan Thompson]

"They" are really a different company

Solid state (flash) storage is really not the forte of hard disk companies. While many do sell SSD parts, they don't actually manufacture the internal flash themselves; they source it from a flash manufacturer. As SSD becomes more affordable and higher density it will most likely come from the flash manufacturers, not the disk spinners.

[Anonymous Coward]

STOP!

HAMR Time!

[Bill Cumming]

So does this mean now...

that instead on Seagate hard drives just crashing

They will now "Crash and Burn" when the heating element goes haywire...

...Well what other icon could I have used... ^_^

[Annihilator]

MD

Wasn't this roughly the way MiniDiscs operated?

[Bill Neal]

Magneto Optical Drive

Seems Japan was the only place with a love for this tech. It is durable, but it seems write speed was half that of read. I remember having an MD player. It was cheaper than mp3 players at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_disc

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no Seagate

Nothing to see here, move along....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just how hot will HAMR drives run?

Will they need a sticker saying "U Can't Touch This"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is increasing capacity that urgent?

Most domestic users have more than enough storage space.

The same is true for most SMEs. Surely what is required is more speed and that all this data is safe. Many servers I see are spinning virtually empty drives to get the spindle count up. DBAs are increasingly keen on SSDs but maybe not enough to be on the bleeding edge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself

More space please!!!

I for one would love to have 10TB+ on a 2.5" removable disk.

[Eddie Johnson]

I'm with phcahill

I'd rather have reliability instead of increased density. How about giving me an HDD with a life of 5-10 years, meaning 43800 - 87600 hours of continuous use? Note how far this is below the total BS 400000 MTBF typically quoted. How about giving me a 5 year warranty that guarantees no drive failure? If your drives truly have an MTBF of 400,000 hours then why not provide a warranty of half that, or 22 years? If I didn't have to RAID everything then I'd increase my storage capacity right there.

[alan lovedog]

oriented !?

Please don't speak american - it's orientated.