The Magnetic Hard Disk Drive Today’s Technical Status and Its Future - Ed Grochowski

The ubiquitous magnetic hard disk drive continues to occupy a principal role in all storage applications, shipping more bytes than all other competing product technologies. The emergence of cloud computing has firmly established the future HDD products well into the next decade. This presentation will discuss today’s HDD products, their technical characteristics, as; performance, reliability and endurance, capacity as well as cost per gigabyte. The technologies which enable these properties as; form factor, interface, shingle write, helium ambient, two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and yet to be implemented heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), will be detailed. A projection of disk drives of the future will be made and their competiveness to flash as well as emerging non volatile memories (NVM) will be discussed.