Hard disk drives are hitting a wall for density in 2019,
with
thinner gases and platters needed to raise capacity. and
few breakthroughs are forecasted that will raise 3.5”
disk
capacity to 40TB and beyond.
Then I thought, why not take the size of the first hard
drives and put today’s
densities on them, we could have
a washing machine sized hard drive in the exabytes.
Then I
realized the R&D, Factory Tooling & RPMs for such drives
would make it an hard sell to datacenters with slow read
/ write
speeds.
So I realized, why has nobody proposed to double / triple
/
quadruple the height of a 3.5” HDD to fit more platters
inside? By making the drive housing multiples thicker of a
standard drive, you can at
least double the HD data capacity with todays mature
platter technology.
This way, the HD only needs one write arm, one motor,
one
spindle, one
interface board, one set of SATA ports and one housing to
multiply the capacity of a hard drive. It
would need minimal R&D, tooling, for the read/write
head, spindle and housing manufacture. The drive might
cost twice as much to make but have 5 times the
capacity as you are using the high precision parts of the
hard
drive for 5 times the platters.
They could make a drive five standard drives thick,
about as tall as it is
long,
and have 6x the platters compared to 5 seperate HDs.
This Sextuple HD could store a
100 TB and sell for $300 retail in 2019, and the company
that made it could make
double
digit profit margins.
Datacenters would gobble this up as the cost per
terabyte
is a fraction of the price compared to buying multiple
standard HDs. Even if half as reliable as standard HDs
they
would gobble it up due to the sheer reduction in storage
costs.
Prosumers benefit too, imagine being Linus Tech Tips
creating a TB a day in raw 12k video footage. Imagine
buying a 100 TB hard drive for $300 in 2019!
My digital life is less than 10TB, but I would love buying
Triple HDs because I could store every MB I have on one
drive, and carry it like a lunch box with over 20TB to
spare!
I nearly kept this to myself to patent it, but I realized
this
would make me & lots of people richer if it got on the
market soon. So I’m posting it so someone can convince
WD, Seagate or HGST to give it a chance on the market.