Seagate Confirms 30TB+ HAMR HDDs in Q3, Envisions 50TB Drives in a Few Years
Seagate this week confirmed plans to launch the industry’s first 30TB+ hard drive using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, reaffirming its commitment to release a 50TB+ capacity HDD within the next few years. confirmed. But before this happens, the company plans to release 22 TB and 24 TB HDDs that rely on Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) and Single Magnetic Recording (SMR) technologies respectively.
Another PMR and SMR play
Various energy-assisted magnetic recording methods such as HAMR will be used in next-generation hard drives in the next few years. However, although PMR has lost momentum, it is still evolving. Seagate has managed to increase the areal density delivered by the PMR + TDMR platform by about 10%, resulting in a 2.2 TB 3.5 inch HDD platter, i.e. a 22 TB hard drive with 10 disks. Additionally, you can expand the capacity of these drives to 22 TB by using shingle recording.
These 22 TB and 24 TB Seagate Exos drives are likely to be drop-in compatible with existing cloud data center hardware and infrastructure and, unlike brand new HAMR HDDs, require extensive validation and certification procedures and not. As a result, Seagate customers can deploy such hard drives fairly quickly, increasing storage density and storage capacity in their data centers.
Seagate is currently ramping up production of 22 TB hard drives for data centers, and they should start shipping soon. Seagate has not revealed exactly when the 22TB and 24TB parts will officially launch, but they are expected to arrive before the company launches his HAMR-based HDDs. Think Q1 or Q2.
30 TB+ HDDs Coming in Q3
In fact, Seagate has been shipping HAMR HDDs to some customers for evaluation as well as within their own Lyve storage system for some time, and these drives have similar capacities to PMR/CMR HDDs. and was not available in large quantities. At Seagate 2nd A generational HAMR platform, the company wants more volume, but it’s taken a long time to get there. The first pre-certified high-capacity HAMR-based HDDs are just ready to be offered to customers for evaluation.
“We have met or exceeded all product development milestones and reliability metrics, and we plan to ship pre-qualified units to major cloud customers in the coming weeks.” Said Seagate CEO Dave Mosley.
Meanwhile, commercial HAMR hard drives with capacities of 30TB and above will ship in the third quarter of this year. This is in line with what Seagate promised last year.
“As a result of this progress, we plan to launch the 30+ terabyte platform in the June quarter, slightly ahead of schedule,” said Mosley. “The speed of his first HAMR volume ramp will depend on many factors, including product yield and customer-qualified timelines.”
Initially, Seagate will only offer HAMR technology for its highest capacity products for hyperscale data centers that require maximum storage density and are willing to pay a premium for drives and supporting infrastructure. As the yields of HAMR-supporting media and suitable read/write heads improve, the technology will be applied to smaller capacity drives to reduce production costs (reduce the number of disks and heads to reduce cost). increase). However, this won’t happen overnight as the company needs to increase the yield of his HAMR drive components and the HDD itself to a comfortable level.
“This year, [the volume of HAMR HDDs] “It’s probably still relatively low,” said a Seagate official. It will happen in calendar year 2024 and I think it will continue to accelerate in calendar year 2025. We will not only address the highest capacity points, but also those mid-range capacity points.”
50 TB+ HDDs Coming Within Years
Seagate’s launch of the first mass-market 30 TB+ HAMR hard drive platform will be a milestone for the company and the industry as a whole. But apparently the company has another breakthrough to share at this point. The company announced this week that it has created his 5 TB platter for 3.5-inch hard drives. This probably requires new media, new write heads, and new read heads.
Mosley said: “And today we have demonstrated a capacity of 5 TB per disk in our recording physics lab.”
For now, these platters are used in spinstands for evaluation and testing purposes, but such platters will enable 50 TB HDDs in a few years. Seagate’s roadmap indicates that such a hard drive may hit the market in his 2026.
Not sure how thin the new platter is. However, with the current nearline HDD evolution trend (increasing areal density and increasing number of platters per hard drive), it’s possible that Seagate will find a way to integrate more than 10 platters in future drives. If so, Seagate can accommodate drive sizes over 50 TB.
In any case, with platters up to 3 TB in production, samples of HDDs up to 30 TB shipped to customers, and 5 TB platters demoed in the lab, Seagate’s HAMR roadmap looks very solid. I can see it. Therefore, hard drive capacity is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years.
