NEXT GENERATION STORAGE
At the end of the Televisual Roundtable presentation (pages previous), Seagate Technology’s Andrew Palmer, shared some insight into the future of hard disk drives – including the new Seagate Lyve S3 cloud offer, a new technology that significantly increases hard drive capacities, to ‘self-healing’ hard drives and recycling.
THE FUTURE OF HARD DRIVES
Andrew Palmer UK Channel Lead Enterprise Data & Cloud Solutions Group Seagate Technology
“Seagate has been making hard drives for the past 45 years. For the past ten years we’ve been building hard drives and putting them into other vendor’s systems, as OEM. There are three vendors who build hard drives, and we build almost two-thirds of that total. “When we were discussing what storage systems you were all using earlier [in the Televisual Roundtable discussion], I can’t recall any of the group naming any vendor except pixitmedia. We work closely with Ben Leaver and pixitmedia – as we do many M&E storage vendors - and it’s probable that you’re already using our storage. “We’ve now got new iterations of that storage that we’re exclusively selling. For example, self-healing systems; systems that look after themselves and don’t need any user interface. And hard drives with far greater capacities and plenty of room to grow with our HAMR technology platform. “It was a logical next step to start adding that technology into our own Seagate branded storage systems, providing our customers with unprecedented technology innovation and TCO. And another milestone in our product portfolio is Seagate Lyve Cloud storage as a service, launched last November in the Equinix North London data centre. We get the hard drives at cost and we’re getting economies of scale already that aren’t available anywhere else in the world. Seagate Lyve has no ingress or egress or API fees and we’re offering S3 storage at a flat rate of $10 per terabyte.
“You might think that SSD will take over, but the future is bright for hard drives. We’re at a turning point where far greater capacity is going to be available on a three-and-a-half- inch drive. There’s a roadmap to delivering 100terabyte hard drives. We’ve already manufactured prototypes. “We’ve been adding incremental density to our drives over the past few years, along with other vendors, and we now offer up to 22 terabytes on one hard drive. But that’s now set to radically change. “Our development team both took a
different fork in the road twenty years ago. We developed a new technology that sits within our drives called HAMR. HAMR stands for Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording.
high. Angstroms is a very small measure. Your fingernail has grown more in the last eight seconds compared to how high that arm flies over the surface. And if it senses vibration, it parks the head and stops writing or reading until the vibration passes, because if it hits the surface, it’s a catastrophic failure. “As the read / write head passes
“A hard drive is made of platters, each with thousands of concentric grooves – think of it like vinyl – and there are almost 2,000 grooves in the space of the edge of a piece of paper. We sprinkle a bunch of tiny metal particles – kernels - into those grooves and that’s where we store data.
“The platter is spinning at up to 15,000 rpm on the outside edge of a standard nearline drive, which is the equivalent of 75 mph and yet across it is a read/write head flying over the surface. The flight height of that read/write arm is Angstroms
across, it will turn the kernel, from a positive to a negative charge by flipping it over - negative-positive, one-zero, one-zero - as binary code which sits behind all computer language. This is achieved by heating up a little dot on the hard drive and very precisely flipping that kernel from a one to a zero in a unique way. The ‘heat’ comes from a laser, runs into a near filed transducer, from which comes a plasma ray. “To achieve greater density, you need
more and more kernels that are compressed within the platter groves and then you need to find the right kernel to convert it to a one or a zero. HAMR enables us to have more kernels within the platter.
“The beauty of HAMR is that with this technology we can build higher and higher densities – that’s called areal density – into a similarly small space with a similar energy consumption. The cost per gigabyte becomes cheaper both in terms of the hard drive build and the energy needed to run it.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
