It is a question of the market. Information “weighs” more and more, technology evolves towards higher resolutions, better sound, better video, all multichannels, servers and services provide increasingly better feeds in terms of overall quality. .. Dolby Atmos, HDR, 4K.
Todo esto hace que unido a las mayores dimensiones de los juegos actuales, mayores anchos de banda por fibra y en definitiva, un mundo donde queremos lo mejor en nuestra vida en cuanto a tecnología hace que esos datos tengan que almacenarse en dispositivos cada vez en mayor the number. This occupies a gigantic physical space year after year, it is expensive to maintain 100,000 hard disks at an optimal temperature and logically the energy consumption soars.
It is only with 50% more capacity that the resources consumed and the performance is significantly improved, not exponentially but in a higher percentage, so that the hard drive industry is and will be under pressure. until we have a device that matches or surpasses them.
What is TDMR exactly?
Two-dimensional magnetic recording or TDMR, which translated into our language means two-dimensional magnetic recording. The name is already pretty precise in terms of what this technology allows, but before we get into it, let’s do a bit of history, since it was Se agate that designed and opted for this technology in 2013.
The curious thing about TDMR is that it is one of those developments that remain in the background, overshadowed or overshadowed by some other slightly inferior technology, but which one wants to promote for marketing reasons despite the fact that the first is always used and is the basis of the second and final.
This way of increasing the capacity of hard drives appeared as the PMR technology was coming to an end and after more than 6 years of development it was late 2016 or early 2017 (we don’t really know when the first companies had samples. HDD) when TDMR first appeared.
Why then is it not popular as such? You must first understand how it works to understand what comes next. As we anticipated, TDMR is a way to extend the life of the “conventional” granular magnetic recording, or CGMR, into which PMR has been incorporated.
At first this new way of recording data was proposed to compete in high density, assuming a significant improvement, but it was not because of the technical problems it caused and which could not be solved, and what TDMR achieves is to record the tracks on the hard drive platters more tightly.
What are the advantages obtained?
The theory said that with TDMR rates and densities above 15%, they would be achieved, but the reality is that they remained 10% more concise according to Seagate itself. The problem is what is called ITI or in other words, the magnetic interference that occurs between runway and runway. The reduction in space means that the write head and read head have a harder time performing their write and read tasks over time and accurately, which means less performance and lower downtime. higher failure.
To solve this problem, what has been done is to include a series of heads to be able to read the data of one or more tracks at the same time. The most obvious question is, what for? Well, because you can read data from multiple inputs at the same time and determine which is correct, thus improving the noise signal and only using a more powerful controller.
The complexity of the hard drive is increased, but the capacity is increased and more importantly, it is a prerequisite to adapt HAMR more easily as they are logically compatible with subtle but important changes.
Additionally, by having multiple heads and after stabilizing and fine-tuning TDMR, Seagate increased read and write rates at the cost of a controller with higher bandwidth capable of handling so much data.
Why has more TDMR not been implemented?
That’s the funny thing about the tech itself, as it isn’t normally advertised under its name. Seagate called it TDMR but advertised it as PMR + so it’s hard for us to find products that name it. In fact, sometimes PMR + is not even named, just simply PMR, which is about to say goodbye as the main goal to bring HAMR to life on the desktop, because on the server it is a reality that in 2022 will be much more crowded.
When this happens, TDMR will be permanently forgotten by many, but others of us know that between PMR and HAMR there was a technology that laid the first and laid the groundwork for the second with a very high reliability and improved performance.
