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The production of mechanical hard drives is the acme of modern manufacturing
The working principle of the hard disk is: the disk is covered with magnetic materials, and the information is stored by the arrangement of the polarity of the magnetic materials; the reading and writing of information is to rely on the magnetic head of the hard disk to "skim" the disk, and rely on the change of the magnetic field to read. or write a message.
The distance between the magnetic head and the disk in the hard disk is very small, generally speaking, only one hundred thousandth of a centimeter, so the hard disk production in the factory must be carried out in a dust-free environment. Most of the fine assembly links are automatically completed by the robotic arm.
The hard disk requires an average time between failures of 1.2 million hours. The requirements for the precision of the process and the reliability of the material are undoubtedly the acme of modern manufacturing. The gap between the magnetic head and the disk is generally 5-10 nanometers, and the disk and the head cannot be in contact, and there must be no sundries between the disk and the magnetic head, otherwise the hard disk will be physically damaged.
When the magnetic head is reading and writing data, the magnetic head will rotate and stretch along the "track"; the rotation speed is generally 7200 or 10,000 revolutions per minute. Mechanical hard disk is a high-precision high-tech product. The three major components: magnetic head, platter, and spindle motor are all exclusively produced in Japan.
Mechanical hard disk VS solid-state hard disk With the emergence of solid-state hard disk, it seriously threatens the status of mechanical hard disk. According to statistics, in the second quarter of 2022, global mechanical hard disk shipments will be 44.65 million units, a drop of as much as 15.4% from the previous quarter. Moreover, with the continuous maturity of solid-state hard disk technology, its price is also constantly decreasing, which has seriously squeezed the price of mechanical hard disks. The price of 2TB mechanical hard disks on the Jingdong e-commerce platform is usually 300 to 400 yuan, which is different from a few years ago. In comparison, it has dropped several times.
With the further improvement of the data read and write speed of solid-state hard drives, it has now developed to PCIE4.0, which can provide a sequential read speed of about 5000MB/s. At present, the average reading and writing speed of mechanical hard drives is 60-80M per second, and the highest can reach 500MB/s. This is already a huge gap with the speed of SSDs, but in this regard, SSDs can crush mechanical hard drives , let it be eliminated from the storage market.
But why does the mechanical hard disk still maintain a shipment of about 200 million pieces a year? This is because, at present, there are more and more large storage devices. Compared with solid-state drives, mechanical hard drives are obviously more cost-effective. For devices that only do storage, capacity is obviously more important than speed. The most important point is that the reliability and lifespan of mechanical hard drives are much higher than those of solid-state drives. If a solid-state drive fails, data recovery is much more difficult than ordinary hard drives. For those large companies, data is invaluable, and the reliability of saving data is often the first priority.
Based on the above reasons, the mechanical hard disk is not only not eliminated, but its technology is also being further developed. Toshiba hard disk has increased the capacity of the mechanical hard disk to 30TB, and the MACH.2 hard disk developed by Seagate has a maximum read speed of 500MB/s above.
Why is there no domestic mechanical hard disk brand in China?
At present, the four major mechanical hard disk manufacturers (Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba) all assemble and sub-package themselves after purchase. It can be said that mechanical hard disks are "US-Japanese monopoly" in the world! 20 years ago, when IBM hard drives were still alive, the Great Wall hard drives were OEM OEM by IBM. After IBM’s glass hard drives became notorious, China’s “Yi Tuo” hard drives were OEM OEM by “Maxtor”, and Maxtor was OEM by Seagate in 2007. After the acquisition, China's mechanical hard drives disappeared completely.
However, it is difficult for Chinese mechanical hard disks to have domestic brands, mainly due to the following reasons: the issue of independent intellectual property rights. At present, the processing and production technology of mechanical hard disks is no longer a problem. The most important reason is the suppression of intellectual property rights and foreign countries. Because of our slow start and development, many basic and advanced technologies are in the hands of foreign companies .
Marketing issues. Mechanical hard drives are not something everyone can play. If there is no sales volume of tens of millions, they will die quickly. Samsung used to make mechanical hard drives , and the quality is top-notch. Apple computers use a large number of customized "black label" Samsung Hard drives, but after 2008, Samsung's mechanical hard drives were also acquired by Seagate. Even Samsung can't compete with the existing giants in the market. The characteristic of the consumer electronics field is that, as a latecomer, it is difficult for you to gain wide recognition and improve cost performance. If you have less recognition, the sales will be low. If sales are low, it will be difficult to reduce costs and even more difficult to obtain funding sources for further research and development . In fact, domestic mechanical hard disks have been used in defense and aerospace fields, because there is no problem of market competition.
Prospect problem. Mechanical hard drives are already a sunset industry in China, so we directly take shortcuts, skip mechanical hard drives, and develop more promising solid-state drive technology . The core of solid-state drives is memory granules. At present , only a few manufacturers such as Intel, Samsung, Micron, Kioxia (Toshiba), and Western Digital (SanDisk) are capable of producing memory granules . Many so-called domestic brands actually use the memory chips of the above-mentioned manufacturers. Domestic brands such as Ziguang and Zhiti all use domestically produced Yangtze River Storage Granules . It shows that we have made important breakthroughs and made great progress in SSD generation. Although there may still be some gaps between the level and Samsung and Intel, it is on the way to catch up.