Huawei's Magneto-Electric Disk MED is a hybrid

Those who need to move large amounts of data often use different levels: SSDs for the most frequently used files, hard disks for less frequently used files and a tape drive for data that is rarely used but must never be deleted.

However, the Chinese company Huawei, manufacturer of suitable hardware for data centers, has problems with the procurement of hard drives: All three remaining hard drive manufacturers are subject to US government sanctions; according to the US Department of Commerce, they are not allowed to supply drives to Huawei. Last year, Seagate even had to pay a fine of around 300 million US dollars for the delivery of around 7.5 million hard disks.

The magneto-electric drive (MED) presented by Huawei at MWC Barcelona in the spring is intended to be used for archiving large amounts of data and requires less power than a system consisting entirely of hard disks. Huawei promises a saving in electricity costs of around 90 percent. However, Huawei did not disclose any details about the system at the time.

MED details

Michael FanJie, vice president of marketing for Huawei's storage product line, has now given the British website Blocks&Files some more information. According to him, a MED consists of two parts: an SSD and a tape drive – not a hard disk. If the system works, then Huawei is circumventing the sanctions with its own development.

The SSD is responsible for the data that is needed quickly, while less frequently required data is stored on the tape. An internal controller takes care of the distribution, while the MED should have a standard block interface from the outside. The storage capacity in the first expansion stage is 72 TByte per disk –, although it is unclear whether Huawei already includes data compression in the capacity specification, as is usual with tape. The storage capacity of an entire rack with an undisclosed number of MEDs is said to be more than 10 petabytes with a total power consumption of 2 kW; the total cost of ownership is said to be around 20 percent lower – compared to a hard disk system –. The access speed of a rack is 8 GByte/s. Huawei is still silent about the distribution of data to the individual MEDs.

A MED is housed in a 7-inch casing and, as with LTO tapes, there is an internal reel onto which the tape in the cassette is wound. Although the cassette can in principle be changed using a robot, this should rarely happen. Huawei wants to minimize access times by ensuring that half of the tape is always on the cassette spool and the other half on the internal spool when the device is at rest. The tape should be about half as long as an LTO tape, i.e. around 400 meters, and have a higher areal density. Apart from the basic technology, there appear to be no similarities to LTO.

The first MED generation is to be launched on the market next year, but Huawei did not name any prices. A second generation with smaller housings is expected to appear in 2026 or 2027. According to Huawei, some Chinese public cloud providers are already in talks about using the technology. (ll)