The coolest hard drive tech in 20 years
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,262 words · ~6 min read
0:00
rces 2019 coverage is brought to you by dbrand their dbrand grip case and their
0:04
prism screen protector are a great way to keep your phone safe check them out
0:07
at the link in the video description so we're here in seagate and we don't
0:11
actually cover hard drives every time because let's face it
0:17
they're really really boring every year it's like okay we've got some
0:20
more capacity and like it might go a bit faster
0:24
also we've got green on our stickers now
0:28
but this is different so seagate's been working on a technology called heat
0:32
assisted magnetic recording or hammer since
0:36
1999 and the first time they built a
0:40
drive using this technology it lasted for a grand total of one sector worth of
0:45
rights and then it was destroyed so to call it
0:48
a concept at that stage is probably being
0:51
generous with that said they've been hard at work on it for the last 20 years
0:56
and they are finally at the point where they are ready to announce that hammer
1:00
drives will be shipping to customers this year so how does it work then
1:05
you can actually see a live feed of a hammerhead
1:09
totally intentional i'm sure so that's the drive head and it's hammer
1:13
technology writing data to the platter that is
1:16
running live next to me right here and every time it moves around you're going
1:20
to see a flash that's the head heating up the platter
1:24
to approximately 450 degrees celsius completely wiping
1:29
out any data that was already there and rewriting it this allows them to get
1:34
better aerial density to the point where we should see if they stay on target
1:39
terabyte drives by the year 2020. so
1:43
this drive right here combines their hammer technology with their sealed
1:46
helium drive technology which gives us the power consumption savings that you'd
1:49
expect from a modern drive as well now reliability remember that story at the
1:54
beginning how long are these things going to last so they have had tests
1:58
running in their lab for the last 18 months where they have individual heads
2:03
that have seen over 8 000 hours of just constant rights going
2:10
through them to put that in perspective that's a petabyte and a half of data
2:13
that's been written through a single head about equivalent to the entire netflix library that is if the internet
2:19
is to be believed so is it going to be reliable
2:23
well i mean i think that guy's job depends on
2:26
it so reliable
2:30
let's go with yeah for his sake but hammer doesn't solve
2:35
all of the hard drive industries problems something that uh
2:38
i've noticed and seagate has had other customers point out to them is that as
2:42
these drive capacities get higher and higher and higher without a performance
2:46
improvement to match we're getting to the point where it's kind of like what
2:50
happened with sd cards before they got past you know 20 to 30 megabytes a
2:55
second of write speeds where you'd like get a new sd card or a thumb drive and
2:58
you'd be like yeah so this is you know a terabyte or whatever but it would take
3:02
me literally weeks to fill it with data like it's
3:06
it's not really useful anymore so to address that
3:11
there's mach 2 and oh sorry this is actually running oh it's
3:14
like warm and what mach 2 is
3:18
is that's really cool so they've got a glass top on this drive so we can see
3:22
exactly what's happening but in effect in a multi-platter drive so most of the
3:26
top ones here are glass so you can see the two actuator arms moving
3:31
independently of each other so it uses a single sas interface which takes
3:36
advantage of sas's ability to have two sort of virtual ports available through
3:41
a single cable connected to a single connector so the drive's firmware and
3:45
processor take the incoming stream of data and split it between the two
3:50
separate heads this effectively doubles the iops performance of this
3:56
drive compared to a normal drive which would run off of a single actuator ARM
4:02
which brings us finally to the most controversial item here in the seagate
4:06
booth i've had everything from eye rolls to speaking directly to the person whose
4:10
pet project this is but this is the uh
4:13
you know what i forget the name so i'm gonna call it the hard drive zamboni and
4:17
what it effectively is is a like fiberglass shell with like these uh
4:23
tread style uh you know trailer mover
4:26
type you know treads on the front that contains a 4u
4:32
server rack so the idea is that amazon
4:35
has a product called uh what have they got they got snowball which is a little
4:38
one they've got snowmobile which i think like a semi-trailer where the idea is
4:42
they've got these high-speed interfaces where you pull these things up to your
4:45
data center offload everything and like literally drive it somewhere because
4:49
it's faster than trying to send it over the internet so this is supposed to be
4:53
like kind of like the middle stage where you like load a bunch of data onto it and
4:58
then you like drive it over somewhere and it could be like battery powered and then you could
5:02
offload it and that might be faster than using a network so
5:06
i'm gonna let you guys decide the controversy for me is this something the
5:10
world needs more of or something the world needs less of let me know in the
5:14
comments below speaking of things to let me know in the comments below let me know
5:19
how much you love these sponsor spots that we've been doing for dbrand all
5:22
show dbrand's grip is their new case that's super grippy it's got extra
5:26
clickable buttons and precision cutouts for your camera fingerprint sensor and
5:30
whatever else it is that you need it's also fully customizable with a dbrand
5:33
skin and their prism screen protector is well well basically the demo kind of
5:37
says everything you need to know about it it's got a great applicator so you can put it on perfectly every time and
5:42
the impact resistance of this thing is unreal like i was using a phone to
5:46
hammer a nail into a piece of wood peeling off the prism and the screen is
5:50
still pristine you gotta see it to believe it which is why we put footage
5:53
of it doing its thing in front of your face right now so your eyeballs can
5:57
capture that so check them out at the link in the video description
6:02
so thanks for watching guys don't miss any of our ces 2019 content by making
6:07
sure you're subscribed to Linus tech tips and we will see you at the next
6:10
absolutely nothing we're done now this one might get
6:14
released like earlier because the editors i don't know how they do the
6:18
things they do so there might actually be more coming
6:21
but i'm done peace and out i'm on a plane in like
6:24
four hours hell yeah
6:28
i mean i love ces sorry that's what i meant to say