
MAMR Breakthrough for Next-Gen HDDs - vanburen
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11925/western-digital-stuns-storage-industry-with-mamr-breakthrough-for-nextgen-hdds
======
otakucode
Mechanical storage is only efficient for bulk storage because NAND chips are
still being price-fixed just like LCD panels and RAM chips before that. It's
no accident it's the same manufacturers involved either. And just like those
other products eventually saw a large international investigation culminating
in "punishments" for global price-fixing, so will NAND. And when that happens,
the fact hard drives have material costs that radically outstrip basic NAND
chips (which are about as dead-simple as it gets) will very rapidly result in
NAND storage offering tens or hundreds of times as much capacity for the same
price. It's absurd the mechanical charade is being allowed to be perpetuated
as long as it has been.

You can't make devices that deal with motors and rare earth magnets and
spinning platters coated with ruthenium and other rare materials at insanely
exacting tolerances, encapsulated in hermetically sealed Helium bubbles for
cheaper than you can photolithographically lay out a bunch of NAND gates in
cheap bulk semiconductors. There really isn't any word for it other than
absurd. And the fact that NAND chips are in literally EVERYTHING means they
are commoditized. Which means economies of scale make them cost almost nothing
to manufacture. And yet... it still costs you 4x or more to get an SSD rather
than several pounds of spinning metal? Nah, that's not how things work without
help.

Why stop with microwaves? Why not make platters out of pure gold and the
read/write heads out of synthetic diamond? Maybe integrate a cryogenic cooling
system and store the data in a Bose-Einstein condensate? At this point it
seems people will believe even that is cheaper than some NAND chips run off a
line like printouts.

~~~
Adverblessly
I admit to not knowing anything about how either drive type is made, but if
what you are saying is true, then I wonder why other big players aren't just
stepping up and making their own SSDs?

If Google can make their own processing unit just for running ML, why aren't
they also making their own SSDs to drastically decrease storage costs and
improve storage performance?

~~~
JosephLark
> I wonder why other big players aren't just stepping up and making their own
> SSDs

There are only a handful of fabs making the required NAND chips. Spinning up a
new fab takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention some
serious technological and manufacturing know how. So it's really not easy for
someone to just up and enter the NAND market.

I don't exactly doubt that price fixing is happening, but my understanding of
current high SSD and even RAM prices at the moment is that there is a serious
demand that outstrips the current fabs abilities. Mobile devices are eating up
a lot of the NAND output.

~~~
disconnected
In addition, chip fabrication processes are notoriously fickle, especially at
very high densities. I wouldn't be surprised if 10% of the NAND chips came out
DOA from the production line.

In the case of GPUs they can turn a defective GPU into a lower tier GPU by
disabling malfunctioning components, which means that it isn't a total loss. I
doubt NAND chips can be salvaged in the same way. Since they are so simple,
there's nothing to recover. It goes straight into the bin.

~~~
otakucode
The difference is that NAND doesn't need to BE high density except in those
mobile devices. For both consumer grade SSDs and enterprise SSDs, NAND already
has such a huge storage density advantage that if they actually used up the
space available inside a 2.5" or 3.5" case and weren't concentrating on
transfer speed as much, yields wouldn't be much of a problem.

NAND does actually have a degree of flaws it can tolerate as they are made
today in consumer SSDs. I am not certain, but SLC Enterprise SSDs made for
database servers and the like might get the best yield chips I'd guess. On
consumer grade devices, there is an amount of 'slack' space that the chips
actually can accomodate that is used for relocating data from damaged areas,
wear levelling, some bookkeeping, etc. So if you buy a 1TB SSD, there might be
enough actual storage on the chips to hold 1.1TB if all of it was made
available. I'd not be surprised if particularly bad runs come out and get
binned as 512GB devices because large portions of the chips are unreliable.

~~~
warrenm
This is not especially dissimilar from how CPUs were made and marketed for
years - CPUs that wouldn't clock at 1.6GHz would get sold as 1.4GHz, for
example

Kinda like how ladders are rated: they _say_ 300Lbs .. it'll _probably_ take
more than double that - but if it breaks when you overload it, the
manufacturer can point to the rating and say, "you exceeded its spec"

------
castratikron
I was a part of research on HAMR a few years ago. I remember one problem they
were having was the heating lasers would burn out after a few writes. There
was also research into spin torque MRAM, so it's interesting that spin-torque
was used to make something that replaced HAMR.

------
biggerfisch
Are data centers still using SATA to connect this big of drives? Seems like
when your disks gets much bigger than 10GB, using SATA gets pretty limiting

~~~
sp332
Even the 12TB drives are only advertising 250MB/s.
[https://www.anandtech.com/show/11903/seagate-ships-
consumerf...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11903/seagate-ships-
consumerfocused-12tb-helium-drives) That's a lot higher than the 150 MB/s or
so you'd get from a 3TB drive, but it's not pushing the limits of SAS or SATA.
Unless you cheaped out and connected a bunch of drives to a single controller.

~~~
ksec
Yes, and funny enough the reason we got 6Gbps SATA was because of SSD.

------
ape4
This is cool. But I assume SSD is going to get better too.

~~~
wyldfire
If SSDs were forecast to overtake magnetic drives, then WD would be unwise to
invest here. But the graph from the article shows a 10x cost/GB continuing
into 2028.

So, yes, SSDs will improve. But they exist in a different tier/market segment
until they can close that cost gap.

~~~
mark-r
Not just cost but density. I'm pulling these numbers out of the air, but
suppose you could have a $100 4TB SSD or a $600 24TB HDD some years from now.
Many datacenters will still prefer the HDD just for the rack space
considerations.

~~~
loeg
SSDs are already more dense than HDDs and will likely remain that way. The
only remaining barrier is $/GB.

~~~
mark-r
I was all set to doubt you, but then I found this:
[https://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-
storage/product-...](https://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-
storage/product-lines/5100#/). My ignorance is showing again.

~~~
loeg
There's even 15 TB available for sale today in the 2.5" form factor:
[https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsung-
PM1633a-MZILS15THM...](https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsung-
PM1633a-MZILS15THMLS-solid-state-drive-15.36-TB-
SAS-12Gb-s/4586754.aspx?pfm=srh)

And 60 TB in 3.5": [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-
unveils-60tb...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb-
ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/)

No spinning rust drive comes close.

------
awjr
So is this a reason to consider buying WD stock? This looks like they've
completely surprised the market with this technology leap.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
No, in my opinion. But not because I don't think it's a promising technology
announcement or a good company, but because _a casual reader of articles on HN
is not positioned to compete with the professional analysts._

They mentioned that they'd be hosting an event with innovation announcements
months ago. Some traders would have been buying WD stock in anticipation of
that event, and wagering whether or not that included MAMR, HAMR, etc, and
what each of those possibilities would mean to the company outlook.

The event and the article describing the MAMR breakthrough were posted
yesterday at 9:30 AM PT. Your 'window of opportunity' to respond to the
article was the few moments it took to figure out which of your guesses about
what they'd announce were confirmed or refuted at the event. Even then, you
may have been reading it literally by eye, while your competition was parsing
it with NLP, using a gigabit connection and server located near the wdc.com
servers, or perhaps using ones near the stock exchange.

[http://investor.wdc.com/eventdetail.cfm?EventID=185452](http://investor.wdc.com/eventdetail.cfm?EventID=185452)
[https://wdc.app.box.com/s/2o32m71nthf84ozbz8wlwyo59uqxb6og/f...](https://wdc.app.box.com/s/2o32m71nthf84ozbz8wlwyo59uqxb6og/file/236947127675)

As a result of this preparation, concurrent with the announcement and market
open, the stock 'jumped' from 84.27 to 86.22, and a somewhat remarkable volume
of 917k shares were traded instead of their daily average of 144k shares, but
have since moved around a bit and are gradually settling in:

[https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:WDC](https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:WDC)

In short: you're literally 24 hours behind the real market. Don't try to play
it minute by minute based on Anandtech or HN publications.

But don't let that discourage you from buying companies based on what you
believe their long-term outlook to be. Or maybe do that, and just buy into
mutual or index funds instead.

~~~
pellucide
Its highly unlikely that an algorithm, however sophisticated can project the
outcome of such an announcement in such a short time.

But discussions like this on a news/analysis piece by a fairly technical new
source combined with above average human intelligence will project a more
likely outcome.

The stock may go up on this news like you mentioned. But it more often than
not settles down. But if OPs time horizon is medium term(a few quarters) or
more, then its worth investing on such news.

