Western Digital unveils breakthrough in hard-drive technology that will be used beyond 2030 http://ift.tt/2yjt6Tp

Data-storage company Western Digital revealed at its San Jose campus a new technology that enables capacity increases in hard drives that could span to 2030 and even beyond.

This generational leap, called microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), will provide enterprise and OEM customers with headroom for continued expansion of storage as the need for larger sources of data continues to grow, while giving Western Digital

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  a competitive advantage for many years.

The need for storage in enterprise and the cloud is continuing to increase at a staggering rate. Application and service providers such as Facebook

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Google

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Amazon

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 and others build platforms on which the entirety of current compute, mobile and expanding Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure resides.

Western Digital executives believe they will have a two- to three-year lead over competing manufacturers like Seagate and Toshiba.

Customers and business are creating terabytes of data hourly, including videos, 3D models, high-quality imagery, behavioral data and more. Add to that projections that machine-created data, used for deep learning and artificial-intelligence applications, could be 50 times what is manually created, and it is easy to understand the need for higher capacity and denser storage options.

Since the mid-2000s, most of the storage industry has predicted that the growth of flash memory, used in solid-state drives from companies like Samsung

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Intel

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and Toshiba, would eventually overtake traditional spinning hard drives by offering a lower cost per gigabyte. Flash offers substantial performance benefits over hard drives, but in bulk storage environments where performance is non-critical, which is 90% or more of the enterprise storage market, cost remains the most critical factor. Because of the stagnation in hard-drive technology density that’s projected through the rest of the decade, most believed that the migration to flash was inevitable.

Western Digital has shown that with this new MAMR technology, there is headroom in hard drives going forward to 2030 and beyond, fundamentally changing the outlook for hard-drive products for the next decade with a target shown of 40 terabyte drive availability in 2025.

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The technology that Western Digital built was done in-house, with help from researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. Because of that, executives believe that they will have a two- to three-year lead over competing manufacturers like Seagate

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 and Toshiba, giving Western Digital an edge on capacity and cost inside that window. As a result, the outlook for Western Digital to gain market and mind share with the critical “Super 7” customers of Facebook, Google, Microsoft

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Amazon, Alibaba

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Baidu

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and Tencent

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 is extremely positive.

Another industry implication of MAMR technology is that it means the potential crossover point for mass adoption of flash-based storage in non-performance-critical enterprise markets is going to be further out than expected. Groups such as IMFT (Intel and Micron joint venture) and Samsung, which have been planning for that shift, will see another five or more years added to the timeline.

MAMR is a technology that uses microwave resonance (like an MRI) to make it possible to write to smaller areas of a disk platter reliably. It uses existing infrastructure and materials for much of the process but requires significant R&D to implement efficiently. The result is a capability to jumpstart increases in density on hard drives over time without significant cost increases, performance questions or platform incompatibility.

Competing products that have been in the running to address hard-drive scaling, including HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording), require larger investments in production facilities and present questions of reliability as it involves heating up elements on the disk platter upwards of 1,300 Fahrenheit. Western Digital was an early part of the development of that technology as well, and that gives it a unique ability to measure the pros and cons of both. With its announcement, Western digital has drawn a line in the sand and determined that MAMR is the future.

Ryan Shrout is the founder and lead analyst at Shrout Research, and the owner of PC Perspective. Follow him on Twitter @ryanshrout.