HAMR increases HDD areal density by briefly heating the recording media as data is written, allowing smaller magnetic regions to remain stable once they cool.
For decades, HDD capacity has increased dramatically while the standard enterprise drive footprint has little …
Hard drives remain central to data center storage for a stubbornly practical reason: enormous volumes of data still need to be stored economically at scale. Flash keeps advancing where performance, latency, and power justify the premium, but HDDs continue to …
A practical guide to data center hardware refresh cycles, starting with storage and working up through storage systems, servers, and AI infrastructure to help determine when to refresh, redeploy, or retire assets.
For years, data center refresh cycles were discussed …
AI storage is not one workload. Flash owns the performance-sensitive hot path, while high-capacity HDDs remain important across the much larger data estate that surrounds it.
AI infrastructure is usually described in terms of GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, networking and flash. …
A practical guide to managing hard drive failure in the data center, from identifying developing drive problems and limiting operational impact to planning reliable replacement and recovery.
Hard drive failure is an expected operational event in any large storage environment. …
Hot-swapping a hard drive sounds like one of the simpler jobs in enterprise storage. Pull the failed drive. Slide in the replacement. Wait for the system to recognize it, rebuild around it, and move on.
In a fully qualified storage …
AI demand has redrawn the hard drive market. With nearline capacity sold out through 2026 and the Big Three openly chasing 100TB, the long-running capacity story is entering its next phase.
Three years ago the storage industry was wrestling with …
In an HDD, the task of positioning the read-write head falls to the hard drive actuator assembly, which moves the actuator arms to which the heads are attached. Positioning and holding the read/write head accurately isn’t easy when billions of …
When it comes to tiering and data centers, flash dominates “hot storage”: those use cases where low latency is a must. Meanwhile, the low cost of nearline HDD has allowed spinning media to retain its dominance in warm tiers, especially …
