Seagate has long talked about heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology and a second-generation hard disk drive platform with a capacity of over 30TB, but it has never been disclosed. Exactly We plan to release them. But this week, the company finally revealed that it plans to release more than 30TB of HDDs a year later in mid-2023.
At a financial results briefing with investors and financial analysts, Seagate CEO David Mosley said, “We are on the road to launching a 30TB or larger drive family based on HAMR technology. “. Seeking alpha (Opens in a new tab)). “Customer shipments of these HAMR-based products are expected to begin by this time next year.”
Seagate’s second-generation HAMR platform is a major problem for the company as this technology can increase hard drive capacity to more than 50 TB. The company’s public roadmap vaguely shows the availability of “30 + TB drives” in its 2023 calendar. Nevertheless, the official shipment of December 20, 2023 can also be considered “2023 Availability”. Therefore, this part is a somewhat skeptical Seagate plan. Nonetheless, Seagate officials have announced the actual availability of these parts.
Seagate has shipped hard drives with the first generation HAMR platform, selected customers and deployed them within the Lyve storage system, but these products have never been offered to a wide range of users. .. Seagate said second-generation HAMR HDDs will be widely available last year.
However, there is a small problem. Customer shipments do not mean that more than 30TB of HDDs will be available in large quantities this time in 2023. Instead, the company may resupply HAMR drives, select clients from among hyperscale data center operators, and suspend launches for all other types of customers.
But that’s not entirely unexpected. HAMR requires Seagate to change the entire HDD platform. This includes media, magnetic layers, write and read heads, actuators, controllers, and many other hard drive components. As these will be Seagate’s new components, 30TB HAMR drives are expected to be very difficult and expensive to manufacture.
Another aspect of HDDs over 30TB with a single actuator is the performance of IOPS per TB. Increasing capacity reduces IOPS performance per TB, affecting system responsiveness and ultimately quality of service. For large hyperscalers, mitigating this effect is not a problem. Still, this issue can be a problem for those servicing traditional corporate data centers or running enterprise-grade NAS, so wait for dual-actuator HDDs of similar capacity. You may like that.
With the cost / price of single-actuator HDDs over 30TB and the performance of IOPS per TB in mind, it wouldn’t be surprising if these ultra-capacity HDDs were initially available to only some customers.
