News Huawei's new magneto-electrical disks promise 90% lower power consumption than HDDs, ability to store tons of archival data

[Admin]

Huawei has invented a new archival storage system utilizing magneto-electrical disks that has 2.5x the performance of tape drives while having 20% less power consumption than tape drives.

Huawei's new magneto-electrical disks promise 90% lower power consumption than HDDs, ability to store tons of archival data : Read more

 

[gg83]

The day may come but I'm doubtful the West will ever need to reverse engineer any tech from China. It would be reverse engineering a reversed engineered technology. This whole thing, I doubt, is new technology. It probably just combines tapes and flash like was stated.

 

[coolitic]

The author was certainly aware about how controversial that last line would be when he wrote it.

 

[cyrusfox]

Heavy on promises, scant on details. China is known for their reliability and innovation in the storage space? Perhaps not yet...

Magnetic-electrical disks will reportedly feature 90% less power consumption compared to hard disk drives and 20% less power consumption than tape drives while having 2.5x the performance of tape drives. According to a screenshot of a Huawei presentation, Huawei says its Magneto electric disks only generate 71W per PB, while traditional HDDs generate 450W per PB — an 84% improvement in energy savings.

The first generation of magnet-electrical disks will be integrated into a rack-mount system featuring more than 10 PB (yes Petabytes) of capacity. A rack-mounted system will be comprised of multiple high-capacity disks featuring around 24TB of capacity. Power consumption of these rack mount systems is expected to be less than 2 kilowatts.

Lets dissect this a bit more, approximately 417 24TB drives is needed to achieve 10 PB, but lets round down to 400 as storage marketers never treat storage at the proper 1024 bits per KB but always 1000[so PB using 1e+12 vs 1024^4 which is nearly a 10% difference). So 2kW across 400 drives is 5W per drive... I really don't see anything novel here at all, slightly more efficient than your run of the mill HDD, a 24TB HDD WD drive consumes 6.8W active and 5.5W at idle (At spin down sleep I would expect it to be sub 0.5W).

The storage space needs innovation and new products to displace the hegemony of DDR/NAND/HDD/Tape. There's $billions (USD) of revenue for the taking in the HDD segment[$20Billion], Tape segment marked less[$5 billion].

China bring it if you got it, but you will need to bring 10+ exabytes to disrupt the current ≈200+exabytes that WDD and seagate put out there each quarter. Tape storage seems to only do around 40 Exabytes of shipment each quarter. There is room for another player if you can make it reliable, performant, and cheap enough.

 

[cyrusfox]

The author was certainly aware about how controversial that last line would be when he wrote it.

IF they are successful, which is a giant if, others will certainly follow their path of innovation and replicate it, not just the west but the east as well... I don't see anything controversial with the statement
Last Sentence for context:

If Huawei’s can turn its new magnetic disk technology into a profitable business, we could see Western manufacturers reverse engineer Huawei's tech for use in other countries.

Success in storage is hard, especially for disruptive technology, regardless of origins. Look at Optane which was based off Stan Ovshinsky pioneering work in amorphous materials from the 1960s(See figure 3), it took 60+ years to micronize/productize and even the full force of Micron and Intel were unable to break in and create a profitable business. Still waiting for the next emergent memory tech, if successful you can bet competitors will follow from all around the globe, but the chance of success/barrier to entry is enormous.

Good luck to all trying to break up this very entrenched and established market!

 

[targetdrone]

It's probably a Frankenthingy putting a nvme cache drive in a LTO cartridge.

 

[Dragonwatcher]

What they don't detail is the power cost of the chips that will transfer all the data that each unit holds back to the Chinese government for their use to either spam you or to steal your plans/ideas or worse you identity. Do not forget Huawei is on the restricted company list for the United States Government for the very reason that their hardware has baked in spyware.