Seagate has been talking about HAMR for many years now but is finally getting close to being able to provide a working product. Currently they use perpendicular magnetic recording which should reach an areal density of 850/900Gbit/in2 in the coming year with a shingled version hitting 1Tbit/in2. Shingled platters store data in slightly smaller and overlapping tracks reminiscent of a shingled roof. In 2016 Seagate predicts the arrival of TDMR which will start at the same density as shingled PMR with an increase to 1.3Tbit/in2 when set up in a shingled format. 2017 is the tentative date for the arrival of the brand new technology and as of now Seagate is predicting an aureal density somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2Tbit/in2. The performance will never match that of flash based drives but the cost per gigabyte will be far more attractive for those who have more of a need to store large amounts of data than to have high speed access. Check out more at The Register.
"We have better visibility into Seagate’s view of the ending of the current perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) era. The ending is delayed by narrowing the tracks so as to cram more of them on a platter. This is called two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and should arrive in 2016."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Canonical makes Ubuntu more snappy with Docker @ The Inquirer
- Blackphone launches privacy-aware app store in bid to reward security-conscious devs @ The Inquirer
- Zombie POODLE wanders in, cocks leg on TLS @ The Register
- Interview with UK gaming system builder CHILLBLAST @ K
- The Samsung Holiday Gift Guide @ TechARP
- The Dell Holiday Gift Guide @ TechARP
I’ve done the math for my
I’ve done the math for my personal needs and figured once we hit the 10TB HDD era that’s when I’m pretty much tapped out. Could store full Blurays instead of even having to rip, encode, and store them the same way I could with DVD’s back when 500GB-1TB drives started coming out.
Now with 4K it’s going to start another 10 year race. *sigh* it never ends for us people who just like high quality multimedia.
10TB!? Who would have thought we’d even be having this conversation 10 years ago?
4K Blu-ray shouldn’t be more
4K Blu-ray shouldn’t be more than double the size of current discs. I’ve got about 400 Blu-ray movies on my server (not including TV shows). The average size of all of them (combined with primary language lossless audio tracks) is about 23GB without any shrinking or conversion. Very few movies actually use anywhere close to a full 50GB disc – I think Avatar/Hobbit are up near the top around 43GB, but that has more to do with movie length (170 minutes vs typical 90 minutes).
ANYWAY, 4K Blu-ray will support H.265 encoding, which in subjective testing comparisons, allows for between a 45-64% reduction in bit rate compared to H.264 without losing picture quality. On the face of it, you get 4x resolution increase at 0.5x the bit rate = 2x file size. It’s not entirely that simple when you factor in movies that are shot at 48fps or 60fps, 10-bit color versus 8-bit color, but generally I wouldn’t expect 4K Blu-ray movies to exceed 80GB on the high end, probably more like 40GB on average.
Ahhh yes I forgot H.265 which
Ahhh yes I forgot H.265 which will make 4K much more manageable. That brings me to the other issue I have with CPU’s and the lack thereof with increasing performance, but I digress. 😛
Magneto-optical rides again!
Magneto-optical rides again!
Aaaaand then there’s THIS –
Aaaaand then there’s THIS – http://wccftech.com/seagate-debuts-8tb-archive-hdd-259-shipping-january/.