HAMR and MAMR are two energy assisted magnetic recording technologies making it possible to have more than 40TB fit on a single hard drive.
Need For high Density Storage
Its no secret that Need for storage is ever increasing, and hard drive Manufacturers are struggling to keep up with the pace. With the Curent PMR ( Parpandicular Magnetic Recording) and SMR ( Shingled Magnetic Recording), they have hit the roadblock.
There are only 2 ways to incease the hard drive capacity - Add more platters or Increase areal density.
Adding more platters means each platter would have to be thinner to fit in the same space, and the Drag from air has to be reduced so the drive can spin efficiently. Air Drag has been reduced with Helium Sealed drives, but thre is a limit on the number of platters you can fit in a drive.
That leaves increasing density the only way to increase a hard drive capacity.
A Big Challange . Higher Density = Higher Instability
Increasing Density means trying to write the data closly on the same space to fit more data. Sounds simple but there are 2 problems.
First, you have to be able to write that much smaller bits of data - your Drive read and write head will have to be advanced enough to allow that.
>Second, at such high density, there is higher instablity. Higher chances of data flipping ( a Zero becoming 1) and data corrouption.
Enter Energy Assisted Recordings - HAMR and MAMR
Both WD and Seagate realized that they can first treat the media with some energy before they write to the media. Doing so, the media is stable enough and can be written to extremely densly.
WD is working on perfecting Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording , and Seagate is working on Heat assisted Magnetic recording.
Both claim that their technolgy can create high density hard drives that can exceed 30TB.
A Mix of HAMR and MAMR ?
While you are wondering which technology is going to win, its worth considering that both the technologies use similar technique to write data and eventaully you may see the vendors using a mix of both. Whatever the case is , 30TB hard drives are not very far away. And we are really going to need it if we are going to create and store 163ZB data in near future.
