All articles tagged with #hard drives
AI-driven demand has left WD with the calendar 2026 HDD supply sold out, with firm POs from seven top customers and orders for 2027 and 2028; enterprise cloud clients dominate WD's revenue, and rising SSD costs may push data centers to mix drives, potentially lifting consumer PC prices.
Helldivers 2 has a large 150GB install size on PC due to duplicate files, a workaround for slow HDD seek times, which is not an issue on consoles with SSDs. Developers are exploring solutions to reduce file duplication and improve loading times, but the current approach reflects a compromise for players with older hard drives.
Two suitcases containing unreleased Beyoncé music and show plans were stolen from a vehicle in Atlanta, with police securing an arrest warrant for a suspect who remains at large. The stolen items included watermarked music, footage plans, and set lists, and the investigation is ongoing.
Garner Products has developed the DiskMantler, a machine that uses shock, harmonics, and vibration to disassemble old hard drives in a matter of seconds, allowing for the recovery of valuable components such as circuit boards, drive assemblies, actuators, and rare-earth magnets. This innovative approach could significantly improve the recycling process for e-waste, although it currently represents only a small fraction of global efforts to address the issue.
Seagate has demonstrated a new technology that will enable the production of hard drives with capacities over 90TB in the future by storing data in multiple layers using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. This breakthrough, developed in collaboration with Tohoku University and Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science, allows for the potential of 3- to 4-level recording, paving the way for hard drives with capacities over 120TB. While solid state drives offer speed, hard drives still excel in capacity, and this advancement could revolutionize storage capabilities in a small space.
Huawei unveiled its next-gen 10 Petabyte OceanStor Arctic magneto-electric storage solution at MWC 2024, claiming it could reduce total cost of ownership by 20% compared to tape and power consumption by 90% compared to hard drives. Additional details on the MED drive reveal a potential spin-on-demand feature that allows disks to power down or turn off when not in use, significantly reducing energy consumption. However, the exact technology behind the power-saving feature remains undisclosed, leaving questions about how it can spin yet consume 90% less power than hard drives. OceanStor Arctic is expected to be available outside of China in the second half of 2025.
Seagate has released new 24TB IronWolf Pro hard drives, showcasing slow innovation in the hard drive industry. The drives feature CMR technology, 7.2k RPM, 285MB/s transfer speed, and 2.5M hour MTBF, but with a nonrecoverable read error rate of 1 in 10^15. Despite the benefits of larger capacity, the pricing seems high compared to competitors, reflecting a market impacted by limited competition and slow innovation.
Seagate has introduced the Mozaic 3+ platform, utilizing heat-assisted media recording (HAMR) technology to increase the areal recording density of magnetic media, enabling upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with a 30TB capacity and higher. The platform incorporates new media, write and read heads, and a controller, featuring 10 glass disks with a special magnetic layer, a plasmonic writer sub-system, and a Gen 7 Spintronic Reader with tiny magnetic field sensors. The new technology requires significant compute power, leading to the inclusion of an all-new 12nm fabrication process controller.
Some Western Digital hard drives used in Synology NAS are flashing warning alerts triggered by the manufacturer's internal SMART data that reports usage stats and monitors health, after being powered on for three years. The warnings can get people to miss real issues like reallocated sectors. Western Digital's documentation indicates to flag for drive replacement as a recommended action at the three-year mark. The Synology subreddit has had discussions about how to disable WDDA and thereby ignore the warning to use all Synology features again.
Windows 11 users are experiencing a bug that causes internal SATA drives to be detected as removable media in the Windows taskbar, potentially leading to data loss. Microsoft has confirmed the issue and provided a fix that involves updating the motherboard's BIOS or manually tinkering with the Registry. While most modern systems won't be affected, users with SATA drives should take precautions to avoid potential data loss.
Hard drives will soon become obsolete as most computer users have migrated to cloud storage solutions and laptops and computers are equipped with solid-state drives. An expert predicts that the last hard drive will be sold in about five years from now.
An analysis of 2,007 damaged or defective hard disk drives (HDDs) by data recovery firm Secure Data Recovery has found that the average time before failure among the sample size was 2 years and 10 months, missing the three-year mark. The company also suggested that older drives were more durable and resilient than new drives, with most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer made after 2015. Secure Data Recovery blamed SMR and size for the dip in HDD reliability, with SMR impacting HDD reliability as the disks place components under "more stress."