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Manufacturers of hard disks are in trouble and they know it. They have been since the development of SSDs, and as these newer disks grow in capacity and continue to see their prices fall, the outlook is increasingly bleaker for conventional hard disk manufacturers.<\/p>\n
To help stem the tide and counter the threat, they\u2019ve been upping the ante where storage capacity is concerned. It\u2019s now possible to get a 12-14 TB hard drive, where just a few years ago, 3-6TB was considered enormous.<\/p>\n
They have accomplished this feat by cramming more and more disk platters inside the drive case and finding ways of reducing friction. At some point, though, there\u2019s an upper limit to how much can be done on that front, and disk manufacturers seem to have hit that wall.<\/p>\n
Or\u2026have they?<\/p>\n
A Japanese firm called Hoya Corp may have found a way around the limitation, all thanks to simple glass.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for the company said he believes that in months and years to come, aluminum substrates will fall into disuse in preference for glass, which is more rigid, smoother and flatter than aluminum, all of which makes it possible to stack more platters in the drive enclosure.<\/p>\n
To be clear, Hoya Corp is doing more than just talking about it. They\u2019ve already developed a prototype of the glass substrate that would be needed. It measures just 0.381mm in thickness, which would allow literally dozens of substrates to be stacked together.<\/p>\n
To give you a sense of scale, the largest, highest capacity HDDs on the market today have seven substrate, so we\u2019re talking about a leap in capacity of an order of magnitude or more.<\/p>\n
Will that be sufficient to counter the threat posed by SSDs? Only time will tell, but it\u2019s certainly an intriguing development and it\u2019ll be fascinating to watch events continue to unfold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Manufacturers of hard disks are in trouble and they know it. They have been since the development of SSDs, and as these newer disks grow in capacity and continue to see their prices fall, the outlook is increasingly bleaker for conventional hard disk manufacturers. To help stem the tide and counter the threat, they\u2019ve been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":25578,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[14],"yoast_head":"\n