
Lasers vs. Microwaves: A Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage - amynordrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/lasers-vs-microwaves-the-billiondollar-bet-on-the-future-of-magnetic-storage
======
snazz
Both technologies sound interesting, but I worry about reliablility and the
cooling needed at the data center scale with the heat approach. With current
overall failure rate at about 1% per year[0], I wonder how much higher-density
storage will affect the longevity of these drives.

[0]: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-
for-q2-2018/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q2-2018/)

~~~
walrus01
In the era before common use of SSDs there were a lot more 10k and even 15k
rpm hard drives, which generate a lot of heat. Without seeing datasheet
figures on what the TDP of a HAMR 3.5" drive will be, I am cautiously
optimistic.

------
dehrmann
> Both HAMR and MAMR make use of a simple strategy: Shoot some energy into the
> targeted grains on a hard disk and you can temporarily make it possible to
> flip their magnetic orientation with an external magnetic field of practical
> magnitude. And as soon as the energy dissipates, the grains regain their
> immunity to spontaneous room-temperature flips.

Is this the ~same principle magneto-optical drives like Minidisc used? The
thing I miss about that technology is how much more robust it is than flash or
recordable optical media.

------
martin_drapeau
Single digit nanometers seems to be the limit we currently have both for photo
lithography and magnetic storage. Considering the diameter of an atom is just
an order of magnitude less (0.1nm to 0.5nm), I feel we are really close to the
physical limit. Scaling down feature size will become impossible really soon.

------
herogreen
English is not my mother tongue and I had never encountered the expression "to
hedge one's bet" so I "skipped" over it without noticing and the next sentence
read like HAMR and MAMR were reversed by mistake. Funny.

~~~
davnicwil
Just for interest - probably somewhere you've heard this before perhaps
without realising is "hedge fund" in finance - the name coming from the
strategy of hedging literal bets with money on markets in such a way as to try
to manipulate odds in your favour (oversimplification probably, I'm not an
expert).

~~~
nostrebored
Hedging has more to do with minimization of risks (and correspondingly
reliability of expected outcome) in finance as well

