 RCEs 2019 coverage is brought to you by dbrand. Their dbrand grip case and their prism screen protector are a great way to keep your phone safe. Check them out at the link in the video description. So we're here in Seagate, and we don't actually cover hard drives every time because let's face it, they're really really boring. Every year it's like okay, we've got some more capacity and like it might go a bit faster. Whoo, also, we've got green on our stickers now. But this is different. So Seagate's been working on a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording or hammer since 1999. And the first time they built a drive using this technology, it lasted for a grand total of one sector worth of rights, and then it was destroyed. So to call it a concept at that stage is probably being generous. With that said, they've been hard at work on it for the last 20 years, and they are finally at the point where they are ready to announce that hammer drives will be shipping to customers this year. So how does it work then? You can actually see a live feed of a hammer head, totally intentional I'm sure, so that's the drive head and it's hammer technology, writing data to the platter that is running live next to me right here. And every time it moves around you're gonna see a flash. That's the head heating up the platter to approximately 450 degrees Celsius, completely wiping out any data that was already there and rewriting it. This allows them to get better aerial density to the point where we should see, if they stay on target, 20 terabyte drives by the year 2020. So this drive right here combines their hammer technology with their sealed helium drive technology, which gives us the power control savings that you'd expect from a modern drive as well. Now reliability. Remember that story at the beginning? How long are these things gonna last? So they have had tests running in their lab for the last 18 months where they have individual heads that have seen over 8,000 hours of just constant rates going through them. To put that in perspective, that's a petabyte and a half of data that's been written through a single head about equivalent to a single head. That's been written through a single head about equivalent to the entire Netflix library. That is if the internet is to be believed. So is it going to be reliable? Well, I mean, I think that guy's job depends on it. So Let's go with yeah. For his sake. But Hammer doesn't solve all of the hard drive industry's problems. Something that I've noticed and Seagate has had other customers point out to them is that as these drive capacities get higher and higher and higher without a performance improvement to match, we're getting to the point where it's kind of like what happened with SD cards before they got past, you know, 20 to 30 megabytes a second of write speeds where you'd like get a new SD card or a thumb drive and you'd be like, yeah, so this is, you know, a terabyte or whatever, but it would take me literally weeks to fill it with data. Like it's not really useful anymore. So to address that there's Mach 2 and oh, Sorry, this is actually running. Oh, it's like warm. And what Mach 2 is is really cool. So they've got a glass top on this drive so we can see exactly what's happening. But in effect in a multi-platter drive, so most of the top ones here are glass. So you can see the two actuator arms moving independently of each other. So it uses a single SAS interface, which takes advantage of SAS's ability to have two sort of virtual ports available through a single cable connected to a single connector. So the drive's firmware and processor take the incoming stream of data and split it between the two separate heads. This effectively doubles the IOPS performance of this drive compared to a normal drive, which would run off of a single actuator arm. Which brings us finally to the most controversial item here in the Seagate booth. I've had everything from eye rolls to speaking directly to the person whose pet project this is, but this is the, you know what, I forget the name. So I'm going to call it the Hard Drive Zamboni. And what it effectively is is a like fiberglass shell with like these tread style, you know, trailer mover type, you know, treads on the front that contains a 4U server rack. So the idea is that Amazon has a product called, what have they got? They got Snowball, which is a little one. They've got Snowmobile, which I think like a semi-trailer, where the idea is they've got these high speed interfaces where you pull these things up to your data center, offload everything and like literally drive it somewhere because it's faster than trying to send it over the internet. So this is supposed to be like, kind of like the middle stage where you like load a bunch of data onto it and then you like drive it over somewhere and it could be like battery powered and then you could offload it and that might be faster than using a network. So I'm gonna let you guys decide the controversy for me. Is this something the world needs more of or something the world needs less of? Let me know in the comments below. Speaking of things to let me know in the comments below, let me know how much you love these sponsor spots that we've been doing for dbrand all show. dbrand's grip is their new case that's super grippy. It's got extra clickable buttons and precision cutouts for your camera, fingerprint sensor and whatever else it is that you need. It's also fully customizable with a dbrand skin and their prism screen protector is, well, basically the demo kind of says everything you need to know about it. It's got a great applicator so you can put it on perfectly every time and the impact resistance of this thing is unreal. Like I was using a phone to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, peeling off the prism and the screen is still pristine. You got to see it to believe it, which is why we put footage of it doing its thing. In front of your face right now so your eyeballs can capture that. So check them out at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. Don't miss any of our CES 2019 content by making sure you're subscribed to Linus Tech Tips and we will see you at the next absolutely nothing. We're done. Now this one might get released like earlier because the editors, I don't know how they do the things they do. So there might actually be more coming, but I'm done. I'm piecing out. I'm on a plane in like four hours. Hell yeah. I mean I love CES. Sorry, that's what I meant to say.