From the article, the key customers for these high capacity next gen HDDs seem to be data centers. At first, it won’t be something next to your laptop.
Data centers needs quite specific performance. From monitoring, they know the read/write workloads pretty good. And will likely buy the drives that have peak performance with those characteristics. Also, as a business (or three letter agency), they need to keep ROI and TCO in view. High capacity disks may help with that (more petabytes at the facility). The MAMR (microwave-assisted magnetic recording) technology will enable continued price per storage capacity advantage over Flash SSDs.
As for the competing next gen technology, HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) has more hurdles to take, and thus lies further into the future, if it matures at all.
While WD takes the limelight with this press release, other competitors may also be working on MAMR tech; I expect other players in this field to bring news in the next year, or else they’re behind the curve too much.
