Tech of Tomorrow: Seagate’s SMR Technology to Bring 5TB Hard Drives in 2014

Updated: September 11, 2013

When someone says the word “Google” or “Apple” or “Samsung”, most people can identify that they are all big name tech companies. Seagate Technology, an American data storage company, isn’t exactly what most people could identify as a big name tech company.

They have, however, worked on something quite fascinating and may even change the concept of the typical hard drive forever. Seagate is developing a new technology called shingled magnetic recording (SMR). Although that may sound complex, it is quite a simple concept in reality.

Track size is normally defined by the size of write heads because they are larger than the read heads. The width of the track is bigger than necessary from the viewpoint of reading data back in order to lower the odds of reading data from contiguous tracks. Seagate’s SMR completely takes advantage of this astounding reality.

To put it into simpler terms, your hard drive has a read and write head. The write head is large and the read head is minuscule in comparison, so it can comprehend the magnetism of a teeny magnetic site without being hindered from other tracks and sites. With SMR technology, because there is no gap between the tracks, the write head gets to write on the track it is trying to write.

In addition, it writes to other nearby tracks that now overlap, and there is zero gap. This is acceptable if the other tracks happen to be uninhabited, but if there is data living in there, the SMR write process demolishes the data. To prevent having to unnecessarily rewrite the whole entire disk, tracks are split up into bands, short blocks of tracks that are rewritten.

Seagate’s approach isn’t the most efficient thing in the world, but the company claims to have shipped one million SMR-enabled drives. Beginning in 2014, Seagate will integrate this SMR technology to 1.25 TB, allowing for four-platter 5 TB hard drives. There is no word for commercial adoption, but it would interesting to see SMR go mainstream.

Source: TechSpot

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josav09

This is why i love seagate, innovation and quality
standard623

i wonder how long it would take to defrag a HD on this new spectrum
BDK

When the big ssd’s are getting cheaper I won’t be using hdd’s anymore so /meh to this.
- Helpful Dude
  
  hah dude, there are always some con’s too for using an SSD
  - BDK
    
    Yeah heftier price and that’s about it. An SSD is faster, cooler, quieter (as in dead silent) and more reliable with no moving parts. Yes they do have limited writes, but it’ll take years and years of daily writing in the gigs to even come close to the threshold, and even then you can still continue to write on them. They’ll outlast any HDD.
    
    I really see no cons except for the price.