Seagate reveals storage roadmap showing 20TB drives by 2020

[Greg S]

Even though solid state drives are an essential for performance, the need for cost effective high capacity storage is still growing. Seagate is aiming to tackle the problem using heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and then transitioning to heated-dot magnetic recording (HDMR) once the technology is ready for production.

HAMR has been under development since the 1990s, but newer manufacturing processes and improved electronic components have allowed it to remain useful and continue to increase storage densities. Few products available to general consumers have used this technology previously. By 2020, Seagate is aiming to produce 20TB hard drives using HAMR.

Seagate plans to launch its first commercially available HAMR drives in late 2018 or early 2019. Drive capacities are expected to be 16TB initially with increased storage density as the technology matures. HAMR will be limited to 3.5" form factors during early stages, so external and cloud storage will remain a need for accessing mass amounts of data from mobile devices.

Current estimates from Seagate indicate that 50TB hard drives should be possible within a decade. Adding a bit pattern to HAMR turns it into HDMR, which is said to be scalable to 100TB or possibly even beyond.

In terms of cost effectiveness, traditional hard drives are expected to remain several orders of magnitude cheaper than any flash-based storage options, but speed is a major concern. Offering 100TB hard drives sounds great, but unless throughput is increased significantly, it could make it difficult to make use of all available space.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/71551-seagate-reveals-storage-roadmap-showing-20tb-drives-2020.html

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

20 TB? That's a lot for an ordinary single consumer. I'm still making do with my 1 TB HDD quite comfortably.

 

[Teko03]

20 TB? That's a lot for an ordinary single consumer. I'm still making do with my 1 TB HDD quite comfortably.

Fortunately for HDD OEM's....everyone isn't an "ordinary" consumer.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Fortunately for HDD OEM's....everyone isn't an "ordinary" consumer.

Generally, not specifically.

 

[amstech]

HD content takes up craploads of space.
I only download 720p versions of movies/shows and they will eat up Gigs very quickly.
I wonder what is the average size of a 4K movie?

 

[Vulcanproject]

HD content takes up craploads of space.
I only download 720p versions of movies/shows and they will eat up Gigs very quickly.
I wonder what is the average size of a 4K movie?

With the mainstream advent of the streaming age as resolutions rise compression has improved to take up much of the slack. HEVC is gradually gaining traction. 4K UHD Bluray boasts 4 times the resolution support over the old 1080p Bluray standard, the largest commercial disc size is still only a triple layer 100GB format. Most movies actually release on the dual layer 66GB discs.

50GB dual layer 'old' blurays have been used for most high end releases the best part of a decade now. So the jump from 1080p high bitrate consumer blurays to 4K UHD versions isn't demanding an enormous amount more storage space.

Various newer competing codecs will inevitably help streaming and downloadable file sizes.

 

[senketsu]

I like the thought instead of having a full desktop case so I can put in 4 hard drives, that I can build a powerful mini or micro ATX rig and only require one hard drive despite using 10+ TB. One drive would do fine as a backup as well.

 

[toooooot]

Will those come with 20 year warranty as well?

 

[misor]

20TB if sold for equivalent of 100$, then I am buying two.

realistically, local hdd prices in the Philippines is not yet the same level as before the Thailand flood...

 

[MaikuTech]

I want them to start a road map to firing the engineers who can't develop a proper hard drive without it failing every time.
If no one really knows the engineering is the problem, also where they get their parts is also a problem.
They were doing too good until after 2010 in october and then they started hdd problems.
If they didn't have problems like that I would giddy enough to go back to them rather than western digital.

 

[joe1946]

I have only purchased SSD drives in the last four years since I already had a myriad of external and bare regular HDDs that had tones of space on them. I prefer the faster speed of SSDs and prices have dropped like a rock in the last four years. All of my PCs and Macs have SSD drives along with my 512GB 12.9" iPad Pro.

 

[Talonvor]

20 TB? That's a lot for an ordinary single consumer. I'm still making do with my 1 TB HDD quite comfortably.

How? I can barely get by with the 15TB I have now, so how can you possibly get by with 1TB?

 

[Talonvor]

20TB if sold for equivalent of 100$, then I am buying two.

realistically, local hdd prices in the Philippines is not yet the same level as before the Thailand flood...

Give it a couple of years after the initial release and yes, 20TB drives will probably cost around $150

 

[cliffordcooley]

How? I can barely get by with the 15TB I have now, so how can you possibly get by with 1TB?

Having a few bad habits myself, I can imagine what you use that 15TB for. Even with my bad habits, I've managed to stay under 5TB.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

How? I can barely get by with the 15TB I have now, so how can you possibly get by with 1TB?

Easy. It depends on what you horde on your storage. In fact I could get by quite easily on just a single 512 GB SSD. At present I'm using just 70 GB on my 240 GB SSD, 390 GB on my 1 TB HDD and 25 MB of my 100 GB Google drive storage. I use a 500 GB portable HDD and some thumb drives to back up my sensitive data, not that I have very much of that, and music. I don't do the movie thing, they don't interest me.

 

[RichardMerryman]

20 TB? That's a lot for an ordinary single consumer. I'm still making do with my 1 TB HDD quite comfortably.

I have 70TB on my personal desktop computer. It's annoying having 6 internal SATA drives and 9 external USB drives. I would much rather have a single 100TB internal drive. Bigger drives can't come fast enough.