Seagate has made significant advances in storage technology, now offering Exos hard drives that boast a 30-terabyte storage capacity. These drives are primarily intended for cloud service providers requiring vast amounts of data storage.
- Areal density improvements allow for 3TB storage per platter.
- Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology enables this increased capacity.
By integrating ten platters into each hard drive, Seagate successfully reached the 30TB capacity milestone. Looking ahead, they plan to further augment areal density, targeting a range of 4TB to 5TB per platter.
- Such advancements could see storage capacities reaching almost double the current offering, with a 50TB Exos drive anticipated to hit the market by 2028.
Exploring Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR)
Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) represents a significant technological advancement in the domain of data storage, spearheaded by the innovative design of Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ platform.
Under this technology, a microscopic laser integrated within the drive’s write head is employed. This laser precisely heats a targeted area on the hard drive’s platter, facilitating the recording of data onto a medium that is otherwise difficult to write to due to its extreme denseness.
Key Features of HAMR include:
- Advanced Media Composition: The platform utilizes a superlattice structure composed of platinum-alloy media. This enables a finer grain size, which is essential for the heightened areal density, ensuring that bits remain stable even at nanoscale dimensions.
- Plasmonic Writer Technology: A component of the writer, it features a nanophotonic laser that directs a highly focused heat spot onto the platter surface, allowing for accurate data writing.
- Spintronic Reading Mechanism: This is coordinated with the plasmonic write technology, incorporating magnetic field sensors of remarkable sensitivity and minimal size for reading data.
- Integrated Controller: A sophisticated system-on-a-chip controller orchestrates the complex operations of writing and reading data.
Will HAMR Boost the Viability of Hard Disk Drives?
Seagate has elevated the hard drive market by introducing drives with a staggering 30TB capacity, achieved by employing 3TB per platter technology.
They project a potential increase to 50TB by 2028, suggesting a continual evolution of storage space in the HDD sector.
It is undeniable that implementing advanced components to enhance drive capacities will impact pricing structures.
The incorporation of heat to facilitate data writing on high-capacity drives may necessitate improved cooling systems, consequently increasing costs. Critics who advocate for the cost-effectiveness of solid-state drives (SSDs) argue that such expenses undermine the economic appeal of HDDs.
Despite the advancements in SSD technology, traditional spinning disks currently maintain a lower cost-per-gigabyte ratio.
As of late 2023, the average flash storage cost was approximately $0.075 per gigabyte, whereas HDDs presented a more budget-friendly $0.05 per gigabyte for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and an even lower $0.035 per gigabyte for SATA drives.
This cost discrepancy is based on average prices across the market.
Seagate, focusing on the Exos line of HDDs, seeks to attract hyperscale data center operators.
By securing large-volume sales to such entities, the manufacturer aims to balance the scales of storage costs and maintain HDD’s competitive edge in the market.
Seagate’s strategy to target bulk sales to major clients holds promise for sustaining the affordability of HDDs—presenting them as a viable option for large-scale data storage needs into the future.
Wow, 30TB on a single drive? That’s insane! Never thought I’d see the day. Go Seagate!
With 30TB, I could finally save all my memes in one place. But seriously, this is a game changer.