Seagate's Shingled Magnetic Recording Tech Boosts HDD Capacities to 5TB and Up

crookedvulture writes "Seagate has begun shipping hard drives based on a new technology dubbed Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR, as it's called, preserves the perpendicular bit orientation of current HDDs but changes the way that tracks are organized. Instead of laying out the tracks individually, SMR stacks them on top of each other in a staggered fashion that resembles the shingles on a roof. Although this overlap enables higher bit densities, it comes with a penalty. Rewrites compromise the data on the following track, which must be read and rewritten, which in turn compromises the data on the following track, and so on. SMR distributes the layered tracks in narrow bands to mitigate the performance penalty associated with rewrites. The makeup of those bands will vary based on the drive's intended application. We should see the first examples of SMR next year, when Seagate intends to introduce a 5TB drive with 1.25TB per platter. Traditional hard drives top out at 4TB and 1TB per platter right now."

I wonder if they could make 50tb drives today?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes I wonder if they already have the technology to make 50 or 100 tb drives and they are just trying to keep their profit margins up by incrementally increasing storage at a fixed rate every year.

Does it (still) make sense ?

[boorack]

Except for some corner cases ? Given that Samsung also learned how to stack their NAND flash and CrossBar technology is almost there ? Traditional disks are almost dead at this point. Relatively high price of SSDs is the only thing that keeps them alive and price is going down fast. 4TB 3.5" SSD drives are already available and 2GB 2.5" drives are certainly possible (if SSD controllers are capable of handling such capacities). Any significant breakthrough in sold state storage technology (vNAND, CrossBar, anyone ?) makes SSD advantages only bigger and there seems to be a lot of room for improvement in this pretty much like in HDD technologies 15 years ago. My bet is that SSDs will take over traditional HDDs in all aspects (including price) in less than 5 yars.