Interesting hard drive news from and concerning Western digital

[thewayne]

First, the good.

WD announces that they have a design for a new hard drive with "14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD ... with 140 TB and beyond"!!!

A HUNDRED AND FORTY TERABYTES IN ONE DISK DRIVE!

I think I may have found a backup solution for my eventual Jellyfin RAID system!

HAMR stands for Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, I don't know exactly how that's implemented. But the other thing that's interesting is the FOURTEEN PLATTERS. Fourteen little discs in a 3.5" form factor? Mind goes POOF. This isn't expected until 2030, which isn't that far away. And I'm sure this is more a data center-oriented drive. But their roadmap is for 60 TB drives in the near-term, which is also quite useful.

Sadly, the article is behind a paywall.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/western-digital-details-14-platter-3-5-inch-hamr-hdd-designs-with-140-tb-and-beyond


Now, the bad.

This next article is from a month ago. Approximately 45 days into the year. Keep that in mind.

And we can thank AI datacenters for this one.

I'm just going to quote a line from the article: "...according to WD's CEO, Irving Tan, the manufacturer's entire capacity for this year is booked out."

THE ENTIRE YEAR IS SOLD OUT, 45 DAYS INTO THE YEAR?!

GUH.

So expect shortages and price increases if you need to buy HDs.

https://wccftech.com/western-digital-has-no-more-hdd-capacity-left-out/

Comments

[disneydream06]

A great big YIKES to what I can understand of that. :o
Hugs, Jon

[kaishin108]

That's insane!

[thewayne]

Both of them! ;-)

[dewline]

I recently got myself a 4 TB Toshiba external HD for about C$200. I guess I'm lucky...?

[thewayne]

Unless it was an SSD, I'd call that a little pricey, but the C$ is a little lower than the US$, so that might explain some of the price difference.  I really need to set up a small SAN, I kinda dread how much those drives are going to cost me.  I think I'm going to aim for a five disk enclosure and three disks initially.

[silveradept]

Big platters is very cool, and they're going to need them because of the problem where the datacenters have decided that they get everything (because they can outbid us) and the consumer market gets nothing at all. Maybe if we could take a pin to the bubble, we'd have a better time, but at the moment, the consumer is just hosed when it comes to finding storage or memory.

(And people predicted this would happen all the same.)

[thewayne]

I just saw an article that said HALF of data center construction is stalled because of a shortage of basic infrastructure items required, as I understand it things like facility power distrubution equipment and such.  And where does this equipment mostly come from?  CHINA.  So nothing likely to be resolved or improved upon while we're waging war against Iran.