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Hard disk capacities have been growing very slowly lately. But behind the door is a big technological shift, when the capacity will grow again by leaps and bounds.
Toshiba, the third of the remaining hard disk manufacturers, usually did not produce various ambitious plans promising that in, say, 5-10 years, HDDs will have capacities of, say, 50 or 100 TB, which will then usually not be filled. But now the company has surprised with a roadmap, according to which a breakthrough in capacity should come in the next two years: almost around the corner, it reportedly has 26tb and 30TB disks, which would mean that the capacity of the disks will increase by 50% in two years.
SSDs have taken (magnetic / mechanical) hard drives most of the PC market and also made them overlooked hardware. But if you need a lot of storage space, HDDs are still unbeatable, because for the equivalent capacity of flash storage, you still have a lot to lose. Today are or soon will be on the market HDDs with capacities of 18-20 TB (and there should also be 22TB from Seagate, but with SMR).
Toshiba, however, has taken steps to make these capacities move a lot at once. In the coming years, several new technologies are expected to appear almost simultaneously, thanks to which capacity will be able to rise much faster against the rather sluggish pace in recent years.
Toshiba in its roadmap states that it is preparing capacity drives 26 TB for the accounting year 2022, which is quite possibly already this year. Toshiba’s accounting year is postponed by three months, so this period realistically represents April 2022 to March 2023. Thus, the availability of these new disks could come only at the beginning of the next calendar year.
MAS-MAMR
According to the roadmap, this capacity will seem to be achieved by a combination of two things. Toshiba already has in its the latest generation HDD with a capacity of 18 TB and 20 TB released a year ago FC MAMR (flux control Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) recording technology. 26tb disk will have its more advanced version, where the record on the platters will be denser. This new technology is referred to as MAS-MAMR-Microwave Assisted Switching microwave assisted magnetic recording.
Mas-MAMR is a technology developed in cooperation with TDK as a supplier of reading/recording heads and Showa Denko K.K. as a fence contractor. It uses double spin-torque oscillators (field generation Layer spin Torgque oscillator, FGL Sto), which generate microwave radiation by which the recording head acts on the hotplate. This increases the energy state in the material at the place where the recording is to take place, which, like laser heating in HAMR, allows you to produce a denser, but still durable record, which could not be achieved under normal temperature or energy state.
Already last year, the first trial versions of these discs confirmed that MAS-MAMR works: Toshiba reports that the use improved the recording quality in the experimental device by 6 dB. This improvement gives room for a greater thickening of the record and, accordingly, an improvement in capacity.
10 platters
At the same time, there will also be an extra plate in the discs. While the maximum for 3,5″ HDD used to be nine plotens (provided that they are filled with helium, otherwise six), Toshiba will now use ten plotens in these discs. This is by the way a goal that was announced ahead of time already in 2019. Probably, this could be due to the fact that the plates will be thinner and made of glass, a technology that it has also been developed for many years. The HDD will also probably be further filled with helium. Toshiba calls this technology increasing the number of fences “multi stacking”.
The combination of these two technologies will bring the 26tb drives, which should come out or be announced sometime in the fiscal year 2022, i.e. by April 2023. Their first deployment will be in the so-called nearline series of disks, which are HDDs for servers and large enterprise storage/Nas. Other derived models for other markets, including our consumer one, may come out with a delay.
30TB hard drives in two years, already 11 ploten
But capacity development is to be unleashed even then. Perhaps in the next fiscal year Toshiba plans to come up with a capacity expansion on a flat 30 TB, which is an increase of 50% against today. these disks also have to utilize mas-MAMR. The main progress in these discs will be the addition of another platens, this time the HDD will have straight 11 platens. This alone should increase capacity by 10% (i.e. at least 2.6 TB against the previous generation). The rest of the missing up to 30TB about Toshiba will get a certain increase in the density of the record on each plate.
These 30TB drives Toshiba plans for the financial year 2023, which should therefore mean that they will be listed between April 2023 and March 2024.
Increasing the number of fences means that the production costs of these disks will increase, which will somewhat hamper the reduction in the price per gigabyte of space, which we would like to see. On the other hand, it is quite promising that these breakthroughs in capacity have succeeded without the deployment of HAMR technology, whose long delay raises doubts about whether it will really be practically suitable for a wide range of HDDs, even consumer ones. MAMR looks significantly less complicated, and this technology could therefore be used in more popular disks.
HAMR: 35-40 TB
However, even HAMR has Toshiba in the plan, the deployment of this technology will come at this company after mas-MAMR perhaps sometime in the accounting years 2025 and 2026. The first generation of nearline HAMR drives is supposed to reach a capacity of 35 TB with about 11 platters. Then, in the next generation, the 40 TB barrier is to be broken, which would be a plus or minus doubling against what is available today. But since it is already conditioned by HAMR technology, this should be taken with a reserve, because HAMR is just one of the recipes for those unrealistic roadmaps from previous years promising high-capacity HDD, of which then nothing was and after a few years they are quite comical.
In contrast, we expect MAS-MAMR drives to actually come to market and this capacity increase will be a reality. Although, of course, we can not exclude that Toshiba will also have some delay in the release of MAMR.
Gallery: historical forecasts of increasing HDD capacity
Source: Toshiba, techPowerUp
Renaissance HDD? Thanks to MAS-MAMR, there will be 26TB disks in a year, in 2024 the capacity of 30 TB
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