Huawei may have used a very clever trick to make hard disks use less power — spin-on-demand disk drives may well compete with tape on performance, but at what cost?

OceanStor Arctic slide.

At MWC 2024, Huawei’s Dr. Peter Zhou took the wraps off a number of new data storage products, including the company's next-gen 10 Petabyte OceanStor Arctic magneto-electric storage solution.

When we reported on it recently, details were incredibility light. We knew it would be a magneto-electric disk (MED) that probably spins, and the first generation of the disk would be used mainly for archival storage. Huawei also claimed that it could reduce TCO by 20% compared to tape, and reduce power consumption by 90% compared to hard drives.