The magnetic hard disk drive you use has been appeared more than 60 years ago. Though some market share has been taken away by the new SSD or other devices, the traditional hard disk drives are still the most important storage tools. In this article, I’ll discuss the main technologies of hard disk drives.
You probably use your hard drive every day. But how much do you know about your HDD (both internal hard disk and external hard disk)? Do you know what drives the hard disk drive development? Certainly, it’s technology. Here, I would like to introduce the fundamental and mainstream hard drive technologies, which contribute a lot to the performance, capacity, speed, and many other aspects of the hard drives.
3 Wonderful Hard Drive Technologies
Though the solid state drives and portable drives are more and more popular nowadays, the hard drives are still the most important way of data storage (SSD or HDD, which is better?). Advanced technologies are the main factor in promoting the development of hard disk drives. In the following part, I will mainly introduce 3 of them.
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Shingled Magnetic Recording
The Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is actually a kind of magnetic storage data recording technology. One of its main functions is to provide more storage space on a hard disk without changing the size so as to increase disk density.
How can Shingled Magnetic Recording increase the capacity of a hard drive? Actually, it reduces the spacing between different recording tracks, so the tracks could overlap a little (this is a bit like the arrangement between shingles on a roof).
Besides, the SMR HDD technology does help to greatly minimize the storage cost of backups, cloud apps, surveillance, and other types of cold storage applications.
HelioSeal
The novel use of a noble gas may be the greatest quantum leap in HDD technology development in recent years. This world-first HelioSeal technology was announced by Western Digital; since then, the traditional air in the hard drive will be replaced by helium. The gas is sealed tightly enough so as to keep 2.5M MTBF and a five year limited warranty.
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Two main merits of sealed helium are (when compared to air):
- Less drag
- Less turbulent
In this way, the capacity of hard drives can be increased through thinner media and incredible mechanical ingenuity. Meanwhile, the power will be reduced.
Micro Actuators
A microactuator is a microscopic servomechanism that supplies and transmits a measured amount of energy for the operation of another mechanism or system.– according to Wikipedia
In general, the read head of a hard drive needs to be positioned exactly to the micron level. Why?
- The platter is spinning at a speed of thousands of rotations per minute.
- It may be affected by a lot of factors: such as drive/server vibration and loud noises.
Though there are many ways to work things out, the industry-first multi-stage micro actuator is an ideal choice. Why?
- An innovative suspension design is adopted by the Micro Actuators to ensure the accurate positioning of the magnetic heads, regardless of the environments.
- The ultra-lightweight piezo elements are used to realize fine-tune track alignment. In this way, it’s no need to adjust the position of the entire arm assembly.
- The higher track density is able to help increase the capacity of hard drive further.
Of course, there is more hard drive technologies in addition to the three mentioned above.
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