Lasers vs. Microwaves: The Billion-Dollar Bet on the
Future of Magnetic Storage:
"For most of the past 50 years, the areal density of hard disks—a measure of how
many bits of data that engineers can squeeze into a given area—increased by an
average of nearly 40 percent each year. Lately, though, that rate has slowed to around
10 percent. Everyone who works on magnetic storage is well aware of this problem,
but only in the past year or so have executives from Seagate Technology and Western
Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, very publicly split on how to solve it.
In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin
shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording
(MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted
magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020.
If one company’s solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and
set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage. Companies that wish to
store huge amounts of data do have other options, but hard drives are still the go-to
choice for enterprise storage needs that fall somewhere between faster, more
expensive solid-state drives built on flash memory, and slower, cheaper magnetic
tape."
See:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/...gnetic-storage