Carnegie Mellon University
October 25, 2017

Zhu quoted on MAMR use enabling HDD growth for data centers

For years companies have been projecting that heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) would allow data centers to achieve new hard disk drive (HDD) storage capabilities. However, progress in density growth (bits of storage per square inch) has slowed recently, dropping this year below 10%, and the high temperatures required by HAMR present major challenges in implementation of the technology. ECE’s Jimmy Zhu believes that the key to renewed density growth lies in microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR). With the use of MAMR technology Zhu believes that HDD areal densities could grow from 1.3 Tbpsi (terabits per square inch) to 4.5 Tbpsi or more, boosting density growth to 15% annually. With this new technology Western Digital estimates that by 2020 70% of all data will be stored in HDDs and 90% of all data center data will be in HDDs. Read more.