At present, these HAMR HDDs are not accessible to regular consumers, but this situation could potentially alter within the next year or so.
The tech industry is abuzz with news of Seagate's latest achievement in the field of data storage. Seagate has just announced that it has started shipping 30TB hard drives that use its second-generation Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to some of its data center customers. This is a remarkable achievement in the race for higher aerial density, which has been ongoing for some time. The company has already shipped qualification samples of these drives to some of its cloud partners as part of its Corvault storage systems. These systems are touted as self-healing block storage systems that deliver multi-petabyte capacity.
While Seagate's new HAMR drives offer an unprecedented level of storage capacity, the company has been tight-lipped about the details, including the number of internal platters. According to Tom's Hardware, Seagate has been shipping HAMR drives to customers for testing for years, but it's been a long and arduous journey to get to this point. In fact, Seagate initially stated back in 2004 that the first-gen HAMR drives would arrive in 2010. However, it wasn't until 2018 that Seagate finally announced a 16TB hard drive, and now it's set to deliver second-generation mainstream drives in Q3 of 2023, which is exactly what it said it would do last year.
The main issue holding back the large-scale production of these drives is that they require entirely new internal components, including new media to accommodate the heating up/cooling down process and new read/write heads. This increases their costs significantly, making them only suitable for large-scale enterprise storage applications for now. However, as Seagate can increase yields for the new components, prices will go down over time, allowing Seagate to transition its mainstream drives to this technology. However, that is unlikely to begin until sometime in 2024.
Seagate seems to have the upper hand in storage capacity over its main rival Western Digital. WD announced it was beginning to ship 26TB hard drives last year using shingled magnetic recording (SMR), and those drives are already available. However, Seagate has announced it's created 5TB platters, so, with 10 of those inside a 3.5" drive, we'll be at 50TB shortly. Whether or not Seagate will be able to hit its goal of 100TB HAMR drives by 2025 remains to be seen, but the tech industry is eagerly watching the developments in this race for higher storage capacity.
The tech industry is abuzz with news of Seagate's latest achievement in the field of data storage. Seagate has just announced that it has started shipping 30TB hard drives that use its second-generation Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to some of its data center customers. This is a remarkable achievement in the race for higher aerial density, which has been ongoing for some time. The company has already shipped qualification samples of these drives to some of its cloud partners as part of its Corvault storage systems. These systems are touted as self-healing block storage systems that deliver multi-petabyte capacity.
While Seagate's new HAMR drives offer an unprecedented level of storage capacity, the company has been tight-lipped about the details, including the number of internal platters. According to Tom's Hardware, Seagate has been shipping HAMR drives to customers for testing for years, but it's been a long and arduous journey to get to this point. In fact, Seagate initially stated back in 2004 that the first-gen HAMR drives would arrive in 2010. However, it wasn't until 2018 that Seagate finally announced a 16TB hard drive, and now it's set to deliver second-generation mainstream drives in Q3 of 2023, which is exactly what it said it would do last year.
The main issue holding back the large-scale production of these drives is that they require entirely new internal components, including new media to accommodate the heating up/cooling down process and new read/write heads. This increases their costs significantly, making them only suitable for large-scale enterprise storage applications for now. However, as Seagate can increase yields for the new components, prices will go down over time, allowing Seagate to transition its mainstream drives to this technology. However, that is unlikely to begin until sometime in 2024.
Seagate seems to have the upper hand in storage capacity over its main rival Western Digital. WD announced it was beginning to ship 26TB hard drives last year using shingled magnetic recording (SMR), and those drives are already available. However, Seagate has announced it's created 5TB platters, so, with 10 of those inside a 3.5" drive, we'll be at 50TB shortly. Whether or not Seagate will be able to hit its goal of 100TB HAMR drives by 2025 remains to be seen, but the tech industry is eagerly watching the developments in this race for higher storage capacity.