this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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OK...what's this HAMR technology and how does it play compared to the typical CMR/SMR performance differences?
Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. It uses a laser to heat the drive platter, allowing for higher areal density and increased capacity.
I am ignorant on the CMR/SMR differences in performance
I fear HAMR sounds like a variation on the idea of getting a coarser method to prepare the data to be written, just like on SMR. These kind of hard drives are good for slow predictable sequential storage, but they suck at writing more randomly. They're good for surveillance storage and things like that, but no good for daily use in a computer.
That sounds absolutely fine to me.
Compared to an MVME SSD, which is what I have my OS and software installed on, every spinning disk drive is glacially slow. So it really doesn't make much of a difference if my archive drive is a little bit slower at random R/W than it otherwise would be.
In fact I wish tape drives weren't so expensive because I'm pretty sure I'd rather have one of those.
If you need high R/W performance and huge capacity at the same time (like for editing gigantic high resolution videos) you probably want some kind of RAID array.
These are still not good for a RAID array, was my point. Unless just storing sequentially, at a kinda slow rate. At least for SMR. I fear HAMR might be similar (it reminds me of Sony's minidisk idea but applied to a hard drive).
My poor memory is telling me the heat is used to make the bits easier to flip, so you can use a weaker magnetic field that only affects a smaller area, allowing you to pack in bits more closely. It shouldn't have the same problem as SMR.