Tl; dr: Seagate was the primary storage producer to introduce heat-assisted magnetic recording exhausting drives to the market and continues to innovate magnetic storage expertise. The corporate is increasing the capability of its next-generation storage drives, though I/O efficiency could also be a priority for some clients.
Seagate began cargo Arduous drives with Hamr Tech in December 2024, turning a long-awaited technological breakthrough right into a business actuality. Now, the storage specialist publicizes that much more superior HAMR drives, with capacities of as much as 36 terabytes, are on the way in which.
Hamr 36TB drives are shipped to a choose group of shoppers for Take a look at and validation. Like earlier HAMR items, these new exos m items are based mostly on the Mozaic 3+ Expertise platform to supply “unprecedented” areal density. The drives use a fancy 10-platter design, attaining an areal density of three.6tb per platter.
In line with Seagate CEO Dave Mosley, the corporate has already achieved an areal density of greater than 6TB per drive in its take a look at environments. The objective, he says, is to additional improve information density to 10TB per tray. Seagate additionally claims that Mozaic 3+ is a extremely environment friendly storage platform, permitting the brand new exos M drives to decrease whole price of possession and scale back energy consumption.
HAMR drives are particularly designed to fulfill the wants of knowledge facilities, providing 300 p.c extra storage capability inside the similar bodily footprint. Seagate additionally estimates a 25 p.c discount in price per terabyte and a 60 p.c discount in energy consumption per terabyte. Dell Applied sciences, an early adopter of the Mozaic 3+ platform, plans to combine Exos M 32TB drives into its “high-density” storage merchandise within the close to future.
Whereas touted because the reducing fringe of magnetic storage expertise, the brand new drives include a notable caveat that Seagate fails to say in its press launch. In line with the merchandise web page For HAMR drives, the upper capability fashions (32TB and 36TB) depend on magnetic recording with tiles (SMR) to attain its spectacular areal density and total storage capability.
SMR-based drives use a complicated structure with overlapping information tracks, which might adversely have an effect on write operations. Nevertheless, this limitation is probably not a serious difficulty for information facilities and AI language mannequin coaching startups as their major focus is on storing giant quantities of knowledge somewhat than frequent or intensive write operations.
As IDC researcher Kuba Stolarski famous, exhausting drives stay a “vital” expertise for AI functions and different enterprise-level storage calls for. Stolarski famous {that a} important majority (89 p.c) of knowledge saved by main cloud companies remains to be archived on exhausting drives.
