TL;DR: Seagate was the primary producer to introduce heat-assisted magnetic recording onerous drives to the market and continues to innovate in magnetic storage know-how. The corporate is increasing the capability of its next-generation storage models, although I/O efficiency could also be a priority for some prospects.
Seagate began transport onerous drives with HAMR tech in December 2024, turning a long-awaited technological development right into a business actuality. Now, the storage specialist is asserting that much more superior HAMR drives, with capacities of as much as 36 terabytes, are on the way in which.
The 36TB HAMR drives are being shipped to a choose group of shoppers for testing and validation. Like the sooner HAMR models, these new Exos M drives are constructed on the Mozaic 3+ know-how platform to ship “unprecedented” areal density. The drives make the most of a fancy 10-platter design, attaining an areal density of three.6TB per platter.
Based on Seagate CEO Dave Mosley, the corporate has already reached an areal density of over 6TB per disk in its check environments. The aim, he says, is to additional improve the information density to 10TB per platter. Seagate additionally states that Mozaic 3+ is a extremely environment friendly storage platform, enabling the brand new Exos M drives to decrease the overall price of possession and scale back vitality consumption.
HAMR drives have been particularly engineered to fulfill the wants of information facilities, providing 300 % extra storage capability inside the similar bodily footprint. Seagate additionally estimates a 25 % discount in price per terabyte and a 60 % discount in energy consumption per terabyte. Dell Applied sciences, an early adopter of the Mozaic 3+ platform, plans to combine the Exos M 32TB drives into its “high-density” storage merchandise within the close to future.
Whereas touted because the slicing fringe of magnetic storage know-how, the brand new drives include a notable caveat that Seagate doesn’t point out in its press launch. Based on the product web page for HAMR drives, the highest-capacity fashions (32TB and 36TB) depend on shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to realize their spectacular areal density and general storage capability.
SMR-based drives use a complicated structure with overlapping knowledge tracks, which may negatively affect write operations. Nonetheless, this limitation might not be a big problem for knowledge facilities and startups coaching AI language fashions, as their main focus is on storing huge quantities of information slightly than frequent or intensive write operations.
As IDC researcher Kuba Stolarski famous, onerous disk drives stay a “essential” know-how for AI functions and different enterprise-level storage calls for. Stolarski highlighted {that a} important majority (89 %) of information saved by main cloud companies continues to be archived on onerous disk drives.
