cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/60059065

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24650125

Because nothing says “fun” quite like having to restore a RAID that just saw 140TB fail.

Western Digital this week outlined its near-term and mid-term plans to increase hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era. In addition, the company outlined its longer-term vision for hard disk drives’ evolution that includes a new laser technology for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), new platters with higher areal density, and HDD assemblies with up to 14 platters. As a result, WD will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.

Western Digital plans to volume produce its inaugural commercial hard drives featuring HAMR technology next year, with capacities rising from 40TB (CMR) or 44TB (SMR) in late 2026, with production ramping in 2027. These drives will use the company’s proven 11-platter platform with high-density media as well as HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy (FePt) on top of platters to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity before writing data.

  • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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    3 hours ago

    With the LLM pushers driving hardware prices through the roof, will any of us be able to afford these?

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 hours ago

      Unless things have changed recently LLMs don’t really used slow data stores with very high capacity such as HDDs, at least not beyond the training stage.

      The prices that have been pushed up by AI are for GPUs and DRAM (price rises which in turn possibly feed onwards to other kinds of chip done in the same kind of fab), whilst this stuff is magnetic data storage on movable disk plates, a very different tech.

      I expect these things at most will only be affected in price very indirectly (for example, if memory prices go up because of all the datacenters targetting AI applications, there might be fewer datacenters set up for other kinds of server side application which are more data-centric, which would impact demand for ultra high-capacity HDDs).

      Not that it makes much of a difference to us run-of-the-mill techies as consumers - even if HDDs get cheaper, with many times more expensive GPUs and RAM we can hardly put together new systems using these things, so at best it might just get a bit cheaper to expand one’s large storage NAS (the slower kind just storing data that doesn’t get accessed often, as the other kind uses SDDs).