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Trevor.Dennis
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 13, 2017
Question

40Tb Hard Drives by 2019 ?

  • October 13, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 446 views

Just found this short article on the BBC.  Western Digital are apparently developing using microwaves to dramatically increase data density on 3.5 inch drives.  I Mwonder if there will be a speed increas to go with it?  It would take a long time to back up 40Tb with todays HDD speeds.

Microwave breakthrough helps boost hard drive sizes - BBC News

Western Digital's new MAMR technology promises 40TB HDDs by 2025 - TechSpot

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    1 reply

    Warren Heaton
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 16, 2017

    Darn it!  I just cleared out my savings on 10TB hard drives!!!

    Weren't we supposed to have HVD (holographic versetile disc) with the same form factor as DVD and BD that could read and write at the same time with something like 150TB capacity by now? 

    Trevor.Dennis
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 16, 2017

    Do you remember Guy Kewney?  He wrote in PC World in the UK many years ago.  I can remember him justifying a ridiculously OTT 400Mb hard drive in PC World.  This was about the time that BBC Micros and Sinclair ZX Spectrums came with 16Kb of memory and we were still using cassette tape unless you were rich enough to own a 5.25 disk drive.  A 10Mb HDD was considered to be something very special indeed — for Personal Computer users at least. This was in the eighties.

    The timeline on this Wikipedia page makes for interesting reading, and actually surprised me.  500Gb was introduced as recently as 2005 by Hitachi (GST).  We reached 1Tb two years later, but progress appears to have slowed after that.

    History of hard disk drives - Wikipedia

    BTW  I see that Guy Kewney passed away in 2010 aged 64.