Seagate introduces the world’s first 30TB hard drives with HAMR technology

Decreased demand across all sectors of technology has led to lower memory prices, with DDR5 modules to be found from 40 SEK per gigabyte (GB) and SSD modules from 600 SEK per terabyte (TB). Despite the latter, hard drives continue to live and thrive. It has long been said that Seagate would take a massive leap on the capacity front, something that is now being achieved.

We’re following well on our announced plans and achieved the key milestone last week shipping initial qualification units to a cloud launch partner, and we expect to recognize initial revenue from 30TB+ platforms this quarter as part of our Corvault System Solutions. – Dave Mosley, CEO, Seagate

In connection with the company’s most recent quarterly report, Seagate CEO Dave Mosley announced that the company had delivered its first 30TB hard drive to customers. It is not yet about any sales but what is called Qualification (QA) samples, which are for third parties to evaluate the product and the last step before the product is considered completed. Seagate expects to start generating revenue in the second quarter of the year on standard-sized hard drives.

Seagate’s largest hard drives today are 20TB, and the fact that they’ve made the huge leap to 30TB is attributed to advances in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, in which the company has invested heavily over many years. In addition to taking a step up to 30TB, which by all accounts will be a premium product, during the year it will also offer 22 and 24TB HAMR hard drives.

To enable the dramatic increase in data density, a laser is used to heat the crystalline grains on the magnetic storage disk to about 450 °C (the thermal part of HAMR), cooling the disks to room temperature after a nanosecond. During heating, magnetic disturbances are reduced in the surrounding crystal grains, which get in the way of writing and reading data on a smaller surface.

It remains to be seen how far Seagate can go with HAMR, but according to the company, in 2024-2025 they plan to reach hard drives of 40 TB or more, and in 2026 there is hope for at least 50 TB. Previous research from 2020 claimed that with HAMR it would be possible to access hard drives of up to 80TB spread across nine storage disks, which was the number of disks used at the time for the largest 16TB hard drives. However, it should not be ruled out that Seagate will go even higher with a combination of improved HAMR technology and more storage drives.

source: tom devices