Who Said HDDs Were Dead? The use of glass could be the solution to improve HDD disks
If there is one aspect that I always recommend changing on a computer when asked, it is changing the storage unit. Going from using an HDD disk to one of the SSD type means gaining speed and performance on our equipment A second youth that can only be clouded by the greater limitation of space in these models with prices in the larger capacity ones still far removed from those offered by traditional hard drives.
Mechanical hard drives (HDD) have lost prominence compared to solid state drives (SSD) but this does not mean that the former are dead.Still are the most used for large capacities and in the current price situation, the combined use of an SSD and an HDD (as content storage) is ideal . And yet, mechanical hard drives still have room for improvement.
And it is that the companies that have made this type of component their banner (in the case of Western Digital, Seagate, HGST, Toshiba…) continue working to improve HDDs traditional and in this advance the glass can play a crucial role in improving the performance they offer, especially in capacity.
The storage capacity they offer is the weapon they have against SSDs, with a fairly good space ratio. And with the glass in between this could exceed 20 TB. A glass that is being used above all in 2.5-inch hard drives and that would reach 3.5-inch models, which are the ones that make up a good part of desktop computers.
Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR)
Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording is the name given to this system. In this way, its operation would be optimized by improving aspects such as speed, low consumption and weight. The use of glass in HDDs would make the surfaces for the data flatter, which would mean that each plate could be made up of more layers and therefore its capacity would be increased. It will increase from the current 900 Gbits per inch to up to 2 and even 5 Tbits per inch.
In addition, glass behaves better at high temperatures given its manufacturing process, which makes it more resistant to heat, a key element that fractures performance. For its use, a laser light and the use of glass are required, a substrate with a thermal resistance of approximately 700º, well above the 200º that aluminum achieves.
The first HDD disks based on this type of development could reach the markets throughout 2019 and it is a giant like Seagate the one that seems best positioned in the use of HAMR. Therefore, and although the performance of SSDs is still superior, the HDDs in our devices have not said the last word.
Source | Techon Nikkei In Xataka Windows | Are you going to format any drive with your computer? We clarify some doubts about the most used file systems
