20TB HDDs coming by 2020, says Seagate

Seagate Technology has announced that it has shipped over one million drives using next-generation shingled magnetic recording (SMR).

Mark Re, CTO, Seagate said,  With nearly 7 billion inhabitants on earth we are creating  an astounding  2.7 Zettabytes of data a year and as such are rapidly approaching the physical limits of how much can be written on a single conventional  hard disk drive. With SMR technology, Seagate is on track to improve areal density by up to 25 percent or 1.25TB per disk, delivering hard drives with the lowest cost per gigabyte and reaching capacities of 5TB and beyond.

The HDD industry is experiencing Petabyte shipment growth rates greater than 30 percent per year while at the same time HDD areal density is improving at a rate less than 20 percent per year. Shingled magnetic recording technology is a solution that leverages existing drive architecture to help close the gap in these growth rates while at the same time providing a relatively simple yet economical path to higher capacity HDDs for many applications.” noted John Rydning, IDC’s Research VP for Hard Disk Drives.

Importantly, SMR can improve reliability by allowing Seagate to use fewer heads and disks to achieve new capacity points.