Continuing the march of progress within the HDD trade, Seagate has revealed that they’ve began transport their 16 TB PMR arduous drives. In a quarterly earnings name final week, the corporate reported that the drives have been transport since late March, with present shipments coming forward of excessive quantity manufacturing of the drives. Seagate in flip expects to kick off mass manufacturing within the second half of 2019, and by Q2 2020 the brand new 16 TB drives can be its highest income SKU. What is especially noteworthy right here, in addition to the capability in fact, is that these drives don’t use next-generation warmth assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) know-how. Instead, they’re primarily based round standard magentic recoding (which is a brand new option to name perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR), which is being boosted by two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).
Previously, we had been anticipating Seagate’s first transport 16 TB drives to be primarily based on their HAMR know-how – choose Seagate clients started receiving the corporate’s HAMR-based Exos X16 drives again in December. However it seems that Seagate shouldn’t be going to ramp up these HAMR drives fairly but. Instead, Seagate has taken the considerably stunning step of constructing a 16 TB 3.5-inch helium-filled arduous drive primarily based round 9 PMR+TDMR-based platters.
Seagate is outwardly making good progress on growing these new CMR drives, and varied cloud datacenters clients have already begun qualification testing for the drives. Here is what Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate, needed to say:
“We are very pleased to announce that we began shipping our 16 TB drives in late March as planned. […] Qualifications are underway at many major cloud and enterprise customers. We expect to begin ramping to high volume later in calendar 2019 and expect 16 terabyte drives will be our highest revenue SKU by this time next year.”
Transitioning from an eight-platter to a nine-platter HDD structure is not any small matter, because it requires a significant redesign of inner parts in addition to incorporating thinner magnetic media and supporting mechanics. The profit, in fact, is a simple improve within the quantity of obtainable storage capability, whereas operators weigh this in opposition to whole drive prices in addition to different penalties akin to better energy consumption. Overall the transfer is stunning for Seagate, however removed from unprecedented – Toshiba has used a nine-platter structure for some time now – so Seagate is has grow to be the second HDD producer to hitch this membership.
In addition to its Exos X16 CMR+TDMR arduous drives, Seagate can be prepping host-managed 18 TB SMR (shingled magnetic recording) HDDs, which is powered by the identical platform. These drives can be aimed toward clients requiring even better capability with read-intensive workloads. Interestingly, Dave Mosley says that the platform used for these new HDDs is prepared for HAMR heads:
“This particular platform for us will take us 16 TB and 18 TB with SMR and other variants. It will take us beyond 18 TB and probably into the HAMR families as well because HAMR is basically drop into this when we are ready.”
For a lot of years Seagate has implied that HAMR can be first used for 16 TB drives, so the sudden shift to CMR + TDMR raises a number of query concerning the the state of the market and the know-how. Is the delay client-driven, with the corporate’s shoppers wanting to stay to confirmed applied sciences for an additional spherical? Or, since HAMR HDDs use totally different parts (new media, new heads, and so forth.), do the manufacturing prices of HAMR arduous drives current a hurdle to manufacturing and/or consumer adoption? Or is the change in plans resulting from one thing else solely?
At any charge, whereas HAMR drives have successfully been pushed again at Seagate, they’re nonetheless very a lot on the corporate’s roadmap. Seagate now plans to start out mass manufacturing of HAMR drives in 2020, with capacities hitting 20 TB or extra.
Source: Seagate
