Seagate’s Roadmap Calls for 18 TB, 20 TB Drives in 2020, 50

Seagate introduced its roadmap for the approaching years, and the corporate is of course combating tooth and nail for the relevance of HDD know-how available in the market. While the advantages of SSDs are already effectively understood by the whole trade, in some situations, it makes extra sense to utilize high-density HDDs – significantly the place deployment house is at a premium, and in situations the place search instances for data saved on the media aren’t all that vital. This is why the corporate is aggressively pushing its new HAMR know-how as a approach to enhance areal density on conventional platter-based media.

Plans to attain 18 TB and 20 TB density HDDs within the first semester of 2020 appear to be effectively inside motive, contemplating the corporate has lately shipped 16 TB HDDs. These HDD options will nonetheless make use of older applied sciences equivalent to CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording), for the 18 TB drives) and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) for his or her 20 TB 2020 merchandise. The firm will later make use of their proprietary HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) know-how so as to improve their 20 TB, and 20 TB+ HDDs with increased efficiency (and density) than might be achieved with the tried and true SMR. When it involves efficiency enhancements, a latent drawback in HDDs in comparison with stable state options, the corporate will ultimately deploy HDDs which make use of two units of learn/write heads as a substitute of a single one.