Enlarge / Western Digital is gearing as much as pattern its first 28TB HDDs to prospects, round a 12 months after saying its first 26TB drives. (credit score: Western Digital)
After a few a long time of speak, Seagate introduced earlier this 12 months that it was transport samples of giant 32TB laborious drives utilizing heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The brand new form of drive expertise makes use of lasers to warmth disk platters throughout writing, making it doable to retailer extra knowledge on a disk with out rising its bodily dimension.
However there’s nonetheless a bit extra capability to be wrung out of older and more-proven recording applied sciences like perpendicular (or standard) magnetic recording (PMR/CMR, typically used interchangeably) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR); Western Digital introduced this week that it is getting ready to pattern large 28TB laborious drives primarily based on these applied sciences, just a little over a 12 months after saying its first 26TB mannequin.
In response to Tom’s {Hardware}, WD makes use of energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) to suit as much as 24TB of information on a single drive. SMR permits magnetic tracks to overlap barely (just like the shingles on a roof), permitting barely extra knowledge to suit onto the identical bodily platters on the expense of write efficiency—this boosts the capability of those drives to 28TB.
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