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SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA

AI Engineer and PhD Candidate,

Independent

Babar Khan is a software-hardware engineer holding B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering and currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, specializing in distributed storage and hardware accelerators (FPGAs, ASICs, and GPUs). Since 2024, he has been working as an AI engineer at a stealth startup, focusing on leveraging AI chips for language models. Previously, he has worked at Intel Germany, SAP Germany, and spent four years as a broadcast TV engineer at a leading media company. Babar actively contributes to open-source software and hardware projects and occasionally answers questions on Stack Overflow. He is multilingual, fluent in five languages.

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

SMR and HAMR Advancing HDD Areal Density
Babar Khan
Babar Khan
Independent

SMR and HAMR Advancing HDD Areal Density

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

This talk reflects on 18 years of SMR evolution —covering physical layouts, filesystems, garbage collection algorithms, device drivers, and simulators.  Furthermore, the talk will also discuss how SMR disks integrated with data storage solutions like RAID and deduplication, including real-world use cases of SMR disks by hyperscalers.

We will also discuss how SMR and HAMR technology interact in the context of AI workloads to provide intriguing new possibilities for HDDs.

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