What else is there left for HDDs to improve on other than volume sizes? With that in mind, Seagate just updated its blog with the remark that they reached 16TB of storage capacity on Internal HAMR Test Units.
It was merely a month or two ago when we tested their 14TB model, which I won’t lie, is plenty of storage for me.
— Seagate —
Achieving another major milestone toward volume shipments of its pioneering HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, Seagate announced it has used its advanced HAMR technology to build and test the world’s first formatted and fully functioning 16TB enterprise hard drive platform in a standard 3.5-inch form factor — the highest capacity hard drives ever produced. Seagate is on track to grow beyond 20TB per drive in calendar 2020.
Seagate is using this 16TB pre-release version of its HAMR-based Exos hard drive to run the tests customers commonly use when integrating hard drives into enterprise applications. The successful tests have confirmed the HAMR drives are plug-and-play and operate just as any other hard drive in standard enterprise application environments. No architectural changes are needed to integrate HAMR drives into current data centers and systems. Customers simply plug the drives in as with any other enterprise hard drive.
In today’s dawning Data Age, the hunger for greater storage capacity continues to accelerate, as data capture and creation at the edge proliferates, and rapidly-evolving Artificial Intelligence applications demand access to ever-larger datasets to extract crucial learnings. Affordable, deployable storage capacity enables the digitization of the world.
Seagate has developed HAMR to enable the next big increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a hard drive.
HAMR uses a new kind of media magnetic technology 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. Seagate’s proprietary execution of HAMR technology will be delivered in the industry’s standard form factor, thus reducing total cost of ownership by getting a lot more terabytes (TB) into the same space as a conventional hard drive. These new product-level HAMR tests provide further weight to the groundbreaking results from last year’s in-lab reliability tests. In those tests Seagate HAMR read/write heads far exceeded industry standards for reliability and lifetime data transfer capability, surpassing customer requirements and standard hard drive specifications by a factor of 20. Combined with HAMR’s plug-and-play compatibility with standard systems, the results have further cemented customers’ confidence in HAMR’s readiness to launch into standard cloud and IT environments.
