Western Digital: 16, 18 TB MAMR Hard Drives in 2019

Megalith

Megalith

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Western Digital has revealed that the first commercial HDDs based on microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology will be released this year. According to one of the company’s slides, these will be 16 TB and 18 TB hard drives. 20+ TB drives with two actuators are planned for 2020+.

As expected back in 2017, the first MAMR-powered drives will feature 16 TB capacities and will use eight platters, which was confirmed by the executive during the event. Western Digital’s 16 TB HDD will be aimed at nearline applications and are intended for cloud datacenters as well as enterprises that require massive storage capacities.
 
As cool as this is, I'm waiting for there HAMR tech to hit shelves so the HAMR-roid from the Iron Man series jokes can commence.
 
Cool, how we can have 20 TB of data fail in 3 months vs 4 TB of data fail in 4 months...
I kid, I kid.
 
LOCO LAPTOP said:
If it was Seagate it would be a reality. lol
Click to expand...

I thought some of the latest numbers seemed to indicate seagate isn't as bad as it once was.

If true should really stop perpetuating old stereotypes...
 
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I wonder how these drives will perform. Will these techniques introduce terrible write performance like SMR drives?
 
Wonder if this tech will be like the helium drives and have an official price floor around 230$ drives all drives under that price will be limited to old tech.
 
The MAMR acronym is comedy gold. Whoever slipped that past the countless meetings, Kudos. Some big jigga MAMRs up in here! Pair em up for the ultimate in performance and stamina! I hope they have valet parking in Hell.

I'll wait for the first round of reliability tests, but my impending revamp of a personal 30TB array is looking less and less painful. All the current drives are 5+ years old. With current usage I could almost move everything to a RAID1 of these, then scale out as needed.

If you're storing this much data on a single drive, and losing it would be painful, then you are doing it wrong. You can pick up a super cheap Phenom based system with a decent SATA RAID controller for less then the cost of one of these big drives. Go NAS and don't look back. Hell, I have an old WD Sentinel sitting in a closet which would cover most peoples needs. You just need redundant storage and a 1Gb connection for your pics, movies, and stuff.

Even beyond RAID, you should always have 2 copies of stuff you don't want to lose. Sure, huge libraries of movie rips like the array I mention above can be replicated, but things like photos, home movies (personal digital video?), and documents should be stored in more then one place. I encountered this all the time back in my retail days. The kindly grandma comes in with a dead external drive, "Can you get my pictures of the grandkids off my backup drive?". Testing shows the drive is bad, but the enclosure is fine. So I say,"Well at least you have the original copies." This was invariably met with, "But, I deleted the ones on my computer to make room, I had them backed up on this!?!" Then I would have to explain that once you delete the originals, it's not a backup anymore, it's just your data.

My soul couldn't take the perpetual shower of GrandMa tears, so I got a real job.
 
I...think I might wait a couple revs and see what the numbers look like in 2-3 years before I install a microwave into my PC
 
Ha just got 8 WD 10TB drives. Wonder how long these 18tb drives will take to get to the sub $200 range via shuckable external drives? Hopefully before my 10TB drives die.
 
If I put some of these in my rig, can I also use it to defrost my dinner? New enclosures will include a food tray on top?

Microwave jokes never get old...
 
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