Are hard drives back? WD promises 800% speed increase

Some might think the hard disk drive (HDD), which is rarely found in consumer computing devices these days, is obsolete. In truth, it’s nowhere near kaput. Why? Hard drives provide capacity that SSDs can only dream of. At least at anything close to an affordable price.

With the data created each year now measured in zettabytes (trillions of gigabytes), we obviously need all the room we can get. To meet that demand, WD (newly divested of solid state experts Sandisk) plans to squeeze every last drop out of the spinning platter technology using multiple techniques. Including:

• SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording), aka overlapping data tracks. This can slow write performance in some circumstances, but increases capacity.
• eAMR (Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording), or applying more energy to the write head for more precise alignment, and closer packing of bits (tiny, variable-orientation magnetic particles). Again, increased capacity.
• HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording), or applying a bit of heat to the surface of the disks making them more responsive to magnetic pulses, also allowing tighter packing of bits.
• ePMR (Energy-Assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) — the same as above, but with the bits standing on their toes, i.e., perpendicular to the plane of the disk/platter. Actually, PMR has been the norm for quite a while, and responsible for the huge jump in HDD capacity over the last couple of decades.

The upshot of all these technologies in the short term will be a new 40TB UltraSMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) 3.5-inch HDD, and what WD says will be models sporting a massive 100TB within the next 10 years.

WD also claims that it will double sequential transfer performance in the near term, and octuple (8X) it over the same upcoming decade. Seeing as sequential throughput currently peaks at somewhere around 300MBps, we’re talking well over 2GBps eventually. Yowser!

Random access performance? No promise were made, and likely for a good reason. Given the nature of moving read-write heads about the surfaces of platters (disks), we expect it to remain far slower than SSDs. A 20 percent drop in power requirements is also touted by WD, lowering energy bill throughout the known universe — always a good thing.

Of course, no press release these days would be complete without mentioning AI — in this case, the huge amount of data it requires. A requirement that WD feels can be met in large part using hard drives. They’re likely not wrong. Along with SSDs and Dynamic memory at the tip of the storage spear, of course.

Keep in mind that these gains are a roadmap. Actual results may vary.