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  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link

    I've used a HAMR on a hard drive on more than one occasion. The outcome was not increased storage capacity.

    On a more serious note, I'm stoked about HAMR increasing mechanical HDD capacity since cold backup isn't a great idea on NAND and getting more iffy thanks to T/QLC. It already kind of sucked with MLC so I still feel like its wise to keep some sort of more durable (in terms of writes and longevity as opposed to physical impact resistance) storage medium around to keep my cat pics safe.
  • HardwareDufus - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link

    16TB means I will never have to delete any of my Fav Cat Videos
  • Alexvrb - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link

    "Cat" videos, I get your drift, wink wink. Hey look, 8K eats up a lot of space, so you might need a bigger Hard drive down the road.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, December 6, 2018 - link

    I actually do have a lot of photos and video of my cat doing various things. She's my itteh bitteh fuzzeh snuggle bunneh and I luff her lots!
  • Alexvrb - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link

    HAMRs are nice but MAHAMR is the best HAMR.
  • rahvin - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link

    I'm curious what the power use of these drives are, they are using significant amounts of power to heat the drive plate. I can see each of these drives using double-digit watts during writing. This will likely throw off server energy math quite badly.
  • Death666Angel - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link

    From the article: "their power consumption is 12 W or below."
    Since only a tiny amount of the platter needs to be heated each time I would not assume excess energy consumption.
  • rahvin - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link

    12W is double a spinning disk which is typically 6w (they can use more while spinning up). As I said this is likely to throw off server energy math in dense installations. In addition the 6W of heat added is likely to impact rack heat designs based around the typical 6w consumption.
  • mkozakewich - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link

    "HAMR heads integrated in customer systems consume under 200mW power while writing..."
    https://blog.seagate.com/intelligent/hamr-next-lea...

    So it's about two tenths of a watt, or 1.6% of the total power budget of 12 W.
  • rahvin - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link

    200mW/s is a significant amount of energy. Especially if you have 48 or 64 of these disks in 4U.
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link

    Just summing up additional 200 mW for a huge number of drives is meaningless. The interesting comparison would be against comparable 14 TB HDDs without HAMR. There the power consumption would be definitely be higher as you simply need more drives. Helium filled drives may challange the first generation of HAMR drives in TCO, though. Long term both technologies cold be merged.

    Side note: W is already "energy per time", so W/s actually makes it wrong.
  • ikjadoon - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link

    Whatever happen to WD's MAMR? WD deadlines were all kinds of wrong. WD thought QLC wouldn't arrive until 2022 // HAMR had "unknown manufacturability" // MAMR was ready for "Production in 2019" // charts showing MAMR with a significant lead in deployment over HAMR.

    Anandtech repeated WD's claims over a year ago: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11925/western-digit...

    Crickets from WD since then.
  • jjj - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link

    WDC is sampling 16TB with 8 platter and they expect 20TB before 2020.
    slide 32 (large PDF)
    http://investor.wdc.com/static-files/2e459184-c106...

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