Seagate: 20TB+ drives in 2019 and 40TB or higher by 2023

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In a blog post Seagate gave some in sight on what they are working on. SSDs might be the trend, but they are moving ahead with their Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, or HAMR technology hard and fast. So yeah, it's HAMR time.



Seagate is already shipping HAMR units for customer integration tests — and the results are as expected.

Seagate -- The HAMR drives are as simple to integrate and operate similarly to any traditional drive. They’ve passed qualification tests with the predictability we’ve engineered into the drives.

Our successful HAMR tests confirm our products are plug-and-play, reliable, and ready to ship in pilot volume next year:

  • Manufacturability: Built over 40,000 HAMR drives; pilot volume in 2018, volume shipments of 20TB+ drives in 2019; drives are built on the same automated assembly line as current products
  • Capacity: Achieved 2 Tbpsi areal density; 30% annual density growth on HAMR over past nine years
  • Reliability: Tests proved single-head data transfers of over 2PB, exceeds real-world specifications
  • Simplicity: HAMR is transparent to host; passed customer testing using standard code
  • Cost: Supply chain fully established and ready to launch; projected cost-per-TB path beats legacy PMR technology

HAMR is a technology designed to enable the next big increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a hard drive. It uses a new kind of media coating on each disk that allows data bits, or grains, to become smaller and more densely packed than ever, while remaining magnetically stable. A small laser diode attached to each recording head heats a tiny spot on the disk, which enables the recording head to flip the magnetic polarity of each very stable bit, enabling data to be written.

IDC’s recent report, Data Age 2025, predicts worldwide data creation will grow to an enormous 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. That’s ten times the amount of data being produced in 2017.

And IDC continues to reiterate that hard drives will be central in managing 70 percent of the datasphere. In other words, the future is very bright for hard drives, assuming the technology continues to offer massive capacity. HAMR is the next technology to increase data density on the roadmap that’s been defined by the major storage technology providers, as part of the Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), representing the industry consensus.



Seagate has long been the leader investing in the future of hard drive technology to address the various pain points within the data center. Seagate is laser-focused on areal density innovation to support the ever-growing exabyte demand. Seagate also continues to lead the way to scale up performance innovating advanced technologies to improve IOPS and latency, and to address TCO requirements with technology-level innovation through Helium, SMR and other initiatives.

Seagate has already demonstrated working HAMR drives surpassing 2 Tbpsi using the ASTC criteria, achieving a capacity using pre-production technology that exceeds the limits of CoPt media for bit cell thermal stability.

It’s clear HAMR is the only technology being researched and tested today that can provide the necessary next step in areal density. With the limits of PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) upon us, HAMR brings us fully back on the path of areal density growth. It’s the only near-term technology capable of ultimately enabling 10 Tbpsi when paired with BPMR (Bit Patterned Media Recording), for a 10x improvement over PMR over the coming decade.

HAMR is on track to deliver 20TB+ drives by 2019, and to continue thereafter with a forecasted 30 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) in data density to achieve 40TB or higher by 2023. This rate of growth in data density is unique to HAMR, and is crucial to ensure a continued advantage in TCO that data centers require from hard drives. In fact, although new HAMR components add some cost on a per-head basis, HAMR drives as a whole can deliver a reduced cost-per-TB compared to PMR drives because of the sheer increase in total capacity per disk.

Paired with SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and TDMR (Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording), HAMR can provide the industry with the best cost-per-TB, and paired with parallelism techniques, performance can scale alongside capacity increases. The benefits of HAMR products cross all segments; HAMR enables both client and enterprise product swim-lanes to grow with the capacity and performance demands of each market.

To date we’ve built and tested more than 40,000 HAMR drives (and we’ve built millions of HAMR heads). These drives have demonstrated the ability to reliably transfer over 2PB of data on a given head; this equates to 35PB of data transferred in a five-year life on a 12TB drive — far beyond any real-world application expectations. And despite early concerns among some industry watchers, no wear-leveling is used in Seagate HAMR drives, nor is it needed to achieve the reliability we’ve demonstrated.

The reliability of glass media used in HAMR drives is well-established and Seagate is the leading expert in media development and manufacture. Our current glass media supply chain has demonstrated 2.5M MTBF with shipping product.

Power, heat, and the reliability of related systems is equally nominal. HAMR heads integrated in customer systems consume under 200mW power while writing — a tiny percentage of the total 8W power a drive uses during random write, and easily maintaining a total power consumption equivalent to standard drives. Thus, no increase in drive temperature occurs. Of course, in a HAMR drive, the media is heated by the laser diode during the write process — but each bit is heated and cools down in a nanosecond, so the HAMR laser has no impact at all on drive temperature or the temperature, stability, or reliability of the media overall.

The bottom line: Our HAMR drives will meet the same data center reliability requirements as a PMR drive.


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