After roughly twenty years of research and development, Seagate is finally ready to launch its HAMR hard drives, which should mark a big leap in terms of storage capacity. The company, which started fiddling with HAMR in 2002, will now begin selling commercially available drives with a capacity of as high as 32 terabytes (TB), with wider availability starting shortly.
The reason HAMR technology works is by heating the magnetic properties of disk materials to allow more data in smaller spaces. Seagate’s HAMR drives employ a laser diode, optical steering, and innovation in drive firmware to achieve faster and more efficient data writing. All this heating, writing, and cooling is accomplished in less than a nanosecond, making it extremely effective in increasing storage density.
The HAMR-based drives by Seagate, based on the Mozaic 3+ platform, are destined to disrupt the storage sector, particularly for industries that need high-capacity drives. So far, Seagate has completed qualification testing with many large-scale customers, including major cloud service providers, which may mark the possibility of mass production and shipment of these next-generation drives.
With the pricing and exact release date still unannounced, Seagate’s Exos M series with 30TB and 32TB drives has already managed to stir excitement in the market. These drives sport 3TB per platter, a substantial improvement in storage efficiency up to three times that of traditional hard drives. Seagate claims the Mozaic 3+ HAMR drives have been subjected to extensive stress tests and proven to be durable, with over seven years of head life under demanding conditions.
These new drives will be expected to cater to high-demand applications that the conventional drive hardly responds to, like the training of AI models or the storage of massive volumes of data, due to their rather limited capacity and performance. Seagate isn’t alone in this high-capacity HDD space; besides themselves, Western Digital and Toshiba also have announced 32TB hard drives, even as Seagate’s HAMR technology will probably set the beat for the industry.
With HAMR drives soon to be a reality, Seagate is well-positioned to change the dynamics in the storage market, providing a solution to the ever-increasing demand for larger, faster, and more reliable hard drives.
