The storage size always is an essential part of hard drives. Western Digital plans to launch large capacity HDD which can reach up to 20TB in 2020 and it will take advantage of MAMR technology rather than the HAMR technology.
Western Digital Will Release Large Capacity HDD up to 20TB in 2020
At present, there is huge pressure of the HDD among the storage market because the price of the flash memory has deduced largely and the solid-state drive has excellent performance. However, HDD is still indispensable in the storage market and it is still the main force to store data in the future.
In 2019, there will be another opportunity for the HDD to upgrade the technology which is the HAMR heat-assisted magnetic recording technology. And Seagate has launched 16TB hard drive with the HAMR Technology and it even can reach up to 18TB in this year.
Thus, Western Digital will research and develop the HDD, and it has made the sample of 16TB HDD and the 16TB and 18TB HDDs will be released officially in 2019. In addition, the 20TB or larger HDD will become a reality in 2020 or later.
Western Digital has announced the future roadmap of HDD in the investor conference in December. Western Digital launched the HDD with 15TB Western Digital HDD in the last year. What’s more, Western Digital will pay more attention to the new generation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology in 2019.
The sample of 16TB Western Digital HDD has made successfully and Western Digital plans to launch 16TB and 18TB HDD in 2019. In the next year, the Western Digital 20TB HDD or larger one will be released.
There is one thing that you need to pay attention to. Western Digital has only pointed out that energy-assisted is the new technology. But we can guess that the new generation Western Digital 20TB HDD will take advantage of the MAMR microwave-assisted magnetic recording technology rather than the HAMR heat-assisted magnetic technology according to the information provided by Western Digital in the past.
And Western Digital also claims that the ground-breaking advancement in MAMR technology will enable Western Digital to address the future of high capacity storage by redefining the density potential of HDDs and introduce a new class of highly reliable and ultra-high capacity drives.
Western Digital also believe that the high temperature of the HAMR technology will lead to the increased cost and decreased reliability, while the reliability of MAMR technology would be better. The internal test shows that the interruption time of MAMR head is one percent of HARM. In addition, reliability tests on the magnetic head show that the writing life of a 99.99% MAMR head is several levels higher than the writing life of a 99.99% HAMR head. Therefore, the reliability of MAMR is better than HAMR.
And the MAMR technology of Western Digital MAMR HDD would be a significant breakthrough for the hard drive industry.
Final Words
After reading this post, you can know the roadmap of the HDD in the future. Western Digital will continuously deserve itself researching and developing the hard drives and it will launch the large storage size HDD up to 20TB in 2020. This new generation Western Digital 20TB HDD will take the new MAMR technology which has better reliability than HAMR technology.