Today, there is a topic on hard drives that attracts Xiao Bian, a professional platter maker Hoya Co., said that when replacing glass plates with current aluminum alloy plates, the hard disk capacity can easily reach 20TB. 20TB is 20480GB! How many movies and how many games can this be installed? Although solid-state drives are superior in performance, in terms of capacity, even large-scale production of 3D NAND FLASH (one of the culprits in the price rise of SSDs) is far behind. However, how did the glass platter this familiar noun come back?
MB, GB, TB are all
Now small software is a few hundred MB at a time, and SSDs are often identified by GB. Only mechanical hard drives are calculated in TB. The gap between each unit is 1024 long and long. 1024MB = 1GB, 1024GB = 1TB, the future of the PB era, that is 1024TB = 1PB. It can be said that the difference in capacity between each unit is a qualitative change.
What is the use of mechanical hard disk?
Have to say, only 10 years, SSD has successfully occupied its own territory, the hard disk as an important data exchange "pool", the actual performance bottleneck for a long time, until the emergence of solid-state hard drive. Of course, to really talk about it, the SSD is also an improvement, not to solve this bottleneck, and Xiaobian will talk about it later.
The role of mechanical hard disk is not the same as before. It is basically in the form of a storage warehouse. It is mainly games and movies. The other files are much smaller. Now the game is generally between 30GB and 50GB, and the movie is actually similar (not compressed). By the way, Blu-ray technology was originally created to further solve the data exchange problem, but the CD has basically been replaced by large-capacity U disk and network. . As the Seagate CEO stated in 2006, “The hard drive can't change the world. It can do what it takes to help people store more junk files and files.†They are interested in searching on their own. Xiao Bian doesn’t say much about it. .
Deja vu glass plate
The actual structure of the hard disk is not complicated. It is only when high-density storage is implemented that a more sophisticated design is required. Among them, the unit volume and number of discs is very important - the amount of data that can be stored per square inch + the total number of discs will determine the storage capacity of the hard disk, which is why the TAG Heuer proposed to replace the aluminum alloy disc with glass discs . Glass platters not only have a higher temperature resistance, but also have a thinner body, the thinnest aluminum alloy disc thickness is also 0.635mm, while the lowest glass platter has been able to achieve 0.381mm, the same space Within it, it is obvious that more than a few platters can be stuffed in, and the capacity naturally goes up.
And so on, glass discs, how familiar the term! More than a decade ago, the hard disk market was Connor, Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Samsung, Maxtor, Quantum, Fujitsu, and many other manufacturers competing with each other; only Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samsung and Toshiba remained. Hegemony, now is Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba "Three Kingdoms." Among them, IBM is the inventor of the hard disk, and it is them that invented the first glass disk hard drive (technical concept is very advanced). Only the technology was flawed at the time and it was prone to bad sectors, causing a lot of hard disk failures. 10GB IBM glass, I believe the old drivers know it, Xiao Bian is also a member of the trick, almost no bad. Ultimately, after losing $500 million, IBM sold some of its hard drives to Hitachi. Of course, this has been more than ten years. Now the glass platters and related technologies are also mature. I believe this problem will not occur again.
Addition: Exceltron Technology was once the only domestic manufacturer of hard disk drives in China, and the technology license was from IBM for Great Wall Holdings. The Great Wall itself also produced mechanical hard disks in 1999, although both sounded like “Great Wallâ€. However, from technology to production, it is entirely two different stuffs. Note Oh, the first product of ETO is also a glass platter!
Little knowledge: hard drive brand merger history
In 1996, Seagate acquired Connaught;
In 2000, Maxtor acquired Quantum;
In 2002, Hitachi acquired IBM hard drives;
In 2005, Seagate acquired Maxtor;
In 2009, Toshiba acquired Fujitsu's hard drive;
In 2011, Western Digital acquired Hitachi HDD;
In 2011, Seagate acquired Samsung hard drives.
Capacity and performance, mechanical hard disk and the future?
The answer is yes, at least in five years, the mechanical hard drive will continue to develop, even if the flash memory particles 3D stacked NAND FLASH, capacity geometric growth, the capacity is difficult to rival mechanical hard drives, after all, the low base - the universal calculation of solid state drives Units are still GB, and mechanical hard drives are almost all TB-level. Of course, this gap will gradually narrow, but it cannot be replaced. The reason lies in the cost. Ten years later, the hard disk may not exist. For example, high-speed network cloud content + local ultra-high-speed memory hard disk hybrids, the computer has no performance bottleneck, and the storage does not depend on the local. As for now, it's time to buy a storage disk as a warehouse. Reason, you know.
