Seagate technology officer: SSD will coexist with HDD in the future

Global data explosion, said Mark Re Seagate technology, storage technology companies SSD will coexist with HDD, is not who replace.

HDD will be the introduction of new technology, he said, with imbricate type Magnetic Recording (Shingled Magnetic Recording, SMR), helium and thermal auxiliary Magnetic Recording technology (Heat - Assisted Magnetic Recording, HAMR) 3 new technologies, including helium technology have been used by huawei with alibaba, baidu using SMR hard disk.

Mark Re said, even though many voices about flash storage (flash) will be the biggest beneficiaries of the information explosion, but not only can think Seagate HDD and SSD coexist, both more will complement each other, like a tape in the past and it had been replaced by the HDD.

Now the most common technology of the vertical writing (PMR), though still very stable and rapid, but has faced its physical limit, therefore, Seagate to develop new technology, improve the storage density and capacity, makes every effort to thin disk airframe and low energy consumption.

Hard disk drive technology are the main challenges for the increase of the areal density, SMR technology can through magnetic track stack with each other, to achieve higher areal density, like overlapping roof tiles, can write more data in the same space.Due to the hard disk heads read element is small, than write data still can be read from the narrow track, and will not affect the data integrity and reliability, Seagate, some products have been adopted.

Seagate SMR technology issued in 2014, SMR technology has advanced data center, baidu Archive of Seagate HDD is used to design and develop rack-mountable server, through the SMR technology to achieve high volume and the lowest cost per TB, become baidu online data archiving solution.The hard disk power consumption is lower than other enterprise products, and produce less heat, its total holding costs are relatively low.

In 2020, is expected to EB (Exabyte) cloud data will account for 60% of the data center market space.Some customer specific cloud data center has become more and more attention to how to don't loss and efficiency of the cases, reduce the weight of the large storage capacity and energy consumption.

Although the helium gas storage cost is higher, but not able to save electricity cost and weight gain compensation, optimize the total holding cost of the cloud data center.

Seagate technology innovation investment to ensure that the helium hard drive can be completely sealed, for example, through the sensor measuring devices in the digital environment humidity, pressure and temperature, in order to enhance the reliability of the product.This solution has won huawei and the height of the main data center clients such as alibaba platform.

HAMR technique will make per square inch to 5 TB storage capacity, power makes per square inch space up to five times now, integrating small laser head to HDD, before you write the heating per 1 data bits, written to your hard drive bit narrow, each square inch of 1 TB areal density can be up to 5 TB.

Seagate, points out that in 2018 the first HAMR technique hard disk will launch, and most of the prototype HAMR components the same as the existing hard disk drive, written by the head of the technology is also used with existing HDD product is same, only slightly modified into optical element.

Future, Seagate continues to invest a lot of heart at the same time, research and development of HAMR and BPM (the Bit Patterned Media) technology.

Seagate believes the importance of the two technology has extremely high, to develop hot magnetic recording (heated - dot magnetic recording) HDMR technology, will improve HDD storage capacity to 10 TB per square inch.