Even though we've all moved on to using flash drives on our machines instead of spinning hard disks, the latter is still the dominant technology in today's data centers. For data that just needs to be stored but not readily accessible, tape drives are still the preferred cold storage method despite being an ancient technology. Now Huawei says it has developed an entirely new device for cold storage called a magneto-electric drive. Not much is known about this new technology, but when it arrives, it could represent a foundational shift in the storage industry if and when it comes to market.
Huawei hasn't revealed many details about this new storage technology yet, but it did talk about it for the first time at the recent Mobile World Conference trade show in Barcelona. Huawei’s Dr Peter Zhou, who is president of the company's data storage product line, revealed the technology for the first time at the show, saying it's called OceanStor Arctic and that it can reduce power consumption over hard drives by 90% while also reducing connection costs compared to tape systems by 20%. However, Dr. Zhou didn't reveal anything beyond that, but Blocks and Files squeezed a bit more information about the system out of a spokesperson. The statement they offered below doesn't fill in all the gaps but provides some interesting details.
The statement reads, "Huawei’s MED (magneto-electric disk) brings brand-new innovation against magnetic media. The first generation of MED will be as a big capacity disk. The rack capacity will be more than 10 PB, and power consumption will be less than 2 KW. For the first generation of MED, we will position it mainly for archival storage. It will be released overseas about 2025H1.”
What's notable about the statement is it's described as a "disk," indicating it might resemble a hard drive with read/write heads, along with magnetic tracks where data is stored. However, it's unclear if it would conform to current 3.5-inch disk drive standards or feature an all-new form factor. This brand-new technology currently doesn't exist, so it's anyone's guess what it looks like, how big it is, and so forth. However, since Huawei is talking about rack capacity, it's assumed it would be a drop-in replacement for magnetic disks and tape systems. The phrase magneto-electric indicates some interaction occurs between the drive's magnetic and electric properties, but not much is known beyond that. However, it's assumed it has magnetic platters that spin, like current disk drives.
In terms of its power savings over existing methods, it's saying it can hold 10 petabytes at 2KW, which is a reduction over a rack of hard drives. Tom's Hardware did the math, and a rack with 288 30TB HAMR hard drives will hold 8.64 petabytes while drawing 2.88KW of power, but the specific numbers are unclear compared with tape systems.
