Hard disks on verge of capacity breakthroughs

For those of you, like me, who thought there wasn’t much new in hard disk drives [HDD], i.e., rotating disks, and all the action was around solid state, flash, drives, I gave a call to Dave Wikersham, president of Seagate Technology.

I figured if anyone knows about the future of HDDs it would be him.

The first obvious question was about Flash versus HDD. As prices of Flash continue to drop and capacity continues to increase I wanted to know if hard drives were on their way to extinction.

Wichersham, not surprisingly, said not by a long shot. He sees Flash as a niche that will be up to 5 percent to 8 percent of the overall market for storage by 2012.

The reason for those low percentages revolve around cost and reliability.

For example, a notebook PC with 32GB of Flash will cost a user $500 more than the same notebook with a 120GB HDD, says Wickersham.

Reliability is the other issue. A typical Flash device has a six month warranty, a hard drive typically has a 5-year warranty.

“Flash is good for many read times but it is not good in a compute environment with lots of read and writes,” Wickersham told me.

As the lithography gets closer and closer together, says Wickersham, there are significant reductions in reliability of the tracks.

So in consumer handheld devices it might be fine, but not in commercial uses where reliability is the number one concern.

That is not to say it won’t be used in commercial products and that brings us to a couple of the latest developments in storage devices.

We will start to see solid state in boot drives in a blade server, with capacities of 32GB and perhaps 64GB in the future.

This is part of a trend toward hybrid drives that most of the major suppliers will be offering within the next 12 months.

A hybrid drive will also use solid state for caching. The Flash is put on the printed circuit board assembly and in this capacity it will start at about 256MB up to 1GB.

Obviously, with that much cache the system can spin down the HDD and put it into a quiet state more often, increasing the life of the drives and still maintain a rapid response as it returns from the sleep state.

There is also a major transition taking place in the HDD industry due to a technology called Perpendicular Recording.

As Wickersham explains it, imagine how many people you could fit in an elevator if they were stacked up across the floor versus if everyone were standing. Standing, or being perpendicular to the floor, gives you more capacity.

The industry has known this for 20 years but it is only now being developed for commercial use.

Perpendicular recording will give a hard disk a 5X bump in capacity per drive. Seagate already has product here and it allows them to do 1TB across 4 platters in a 3.5-inch drive.

Next up is HAMR [Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording], pronounced Hammer, Technology. This change is more revolutionary. HAMR will use some kind of light, like lasers, to record on very hard media.

Add 5X capacity to a 1TB drive using HAMR.

Finally, something simply called Bit Pattern Media [BPM] allows the drive to record in islands of bits rather than in the conventional narrow tracks. By writing in these islands, Wickersham says, you get another 5X improvement in capacity.

There you have it. I guess there is still plenty of life left in those rotating platters.