Seagate is working on 30TB HDDs, 50 TB in 5 years and 100 TB by 2030

According to Seagate, heat-assisted magnetic recording hard disk drives (HAMR) are already in the works, a small number of consumers have been able to obtain the 20TB HAMR drives already, and a 30TB version is in the works.

Although there is no official release date for the 30TB Hamr (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) HDD, it is projected to arrive in 2023 or 2024, several years before the objective of a 50TB drive, which is set for 2026. These limited-edition hamr hard drives are meant particularly for "primary consumers" who want to become acquainted with the latest technologies. With the 30TB drive, the business is one step closer to achieving its 10-year objective of creating 100TB drives.

A while ago researchers have managed to increase the achievable data density tenfold with the help of graphene. Hard drives use a carbon-based overcoat to protect the platter from read and write heads and other factors. To increase storage capacity, manufacturers have reduced the space between the head and the platters. Today it is about 3 nanometers thick, which has increased the density to about 1 TB per square inch. The researchers replaced a coating with a variant of graphene, containing one to four layers of the material. After measuring corrosion, thermal stability, surface smoothness and lubricant handling, they concluded that graphene reduces friction by a factor of two and causes two and a half times less corrosion. Hamr heats the iron-platinum alloy platters to high temperatures that regular coatings cannot handle. Graphene in combination with hamr should be able to lead to a data density of about 10 TB per square inch.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of consumers now use solid-state drives (SSDs), the 'old-fashioned' hard disk is still in development. The use of graphene and hamr technology has the potential to enhance data density by a factor of a hundred. This is particularly appealing to consumers that want a big amount of storage, such as those who use data storage servers. Great-density hard disk drives (HDDs) are now less expensive per gigabyte than solid-state drives (SSDs), and because of their high data density, they may be around for a long time.