Western digital implements mamr technology on its 16tb hard drives

Mechanical hard drives are far from finished. Western Digital already has its new 16TB hard drives with MAMR technology ready, having passed all tests, says brand manager Michael Cordano. In addition, the brand also plans to launch 18 TB hard drives these years and next year 20 TB.

What does MAMR technology consist of?

As we see, mechanical hard drives continue to increase their capacity at a fairly rapid rate. After the SSDs came out as the main units for the installation of operating systems and better performance, the mechanical disks have remained with the objective of being secondary units and with enormous storage capacity.

Western Digital is one of the leading companies in the manufacture of storage units and they do not want to lag behind their competitors. Its new professional-oriented hard drives and data centers implement a technology called MAMR or in Spanish, microwave-assisted magnetic recording. This will allow us to increase, once again, the density of information stored in the dishes.

These hard drives record information about tiny metal hairs installed on the platter, where the read / write head can magnetically record a 1 or 0. Increasing density means decreasing the thickness of these hairs, but as they become smaller, require more energy. In addition, there is the problem that the more energy the less control over them.

This new MAMR technology solves this problem by integrating a torque oscillator in the head to generate a magnetic field that gives more energy to the hairs. And in this way it is possible to handle them more easily with more energy.

Source: Techpot

Western Digital Roadmap

Thanks to this technology, Western Digital plans to considerably increase the total capacity of its new hard drives, as well as their performance. We must not forget that they are discs, for now, aimed at data storage stations, and their cost will be around 600 euros approximately.

Manufacturers like Seagate already have mechanical hard drives with a capacity of up to 16TB at a similar cost. This particular manufacturer uses HAMR technology, or heat-assist magnetic recording for its new disc. This what it does is instead of using the electric field of MAMR to increase the energy, it adds a laser to heat the filament of the plate to 700 ^o C.

Of course Western Digital also reports that it is researching this competing technology and how the performance of the disc is better or worse than its own.

The conclusion is that this type of technology increases the cost per GB by 20% compared to common hard drives, and that is why they still have a high cost and are not aimed at home users. We hope that with the evolution of this type of technology these discs will soon arrive at a similar cost, in terms of capacity than normal ones and all of us can enjoy one of them in our team.

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