Seagate: New HDD Tech To Enable 100 TB HDDs
Who doesn't want more storage?
Consistent capacity growth in hard disk drives (HDDs) has become something we take for granted. It isn’t so trivial if you think about the fact that there are in fact physical limits to how much data you can store on one disk and every now and then we are nearing a limit that can’t be topped anymore. The last limit was hit in 2005 and the next seems to be arriving in the 2013 – 2015 timeframe. However, a new technology breathes new life into HDDs. HAMR will bring massive storage growth and propel the industry far beyond 100 TB.
When Samsung announced its new 2 TB Spinpoint HDD last week and mentioned that it can now store 667 GB on one 3.5-inch disk, I remembered how far the current perpendicular recording technology has come since its launch in 2006. The first 3.5-inch PMR drive, Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.5, packed only 75 GB on one disk. Back then, the storage density of PMR disks was just over 100 GB/inch2 and the industry forecasted that PMR will reach about 1 TB/inch2 until it runs out of room.
It was a natural question to ask where the current Spinpoint drive stands. It turns out that it is over 700 Gb/inch2 already, while Seagate’s mass market drives have reached 541 Gb/inch2. At the current pace, it appears that the industry will run out of room in the not too distant future. So I called up Seagate to find out more.
Seagate SVP Mark Re told me that Seagate in fact believes that there will be just a few more PMR product generations and a new technology will be necessary within 3 to 5 years as PMR may reach its end just north of 1 Tb/inch2. Re said that the industry has a choice to transition to patterned media or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to decrease the distance between bits on the disk and increase the maximum areal density. Re declined to pinpoint the potential of HAMR exactly, but said that Seagate currently expects a soft limit to arrive at about 50 Tb/inch2. If the 3.5” HDD form factor survives, then we should see PMR to top out at about 5-6 TB per drive. With roughly 50x the potential of PMR, HAMR should lead the way beyond 100 TB drives and possibly into the region of 200 – 300 TB in the 2020 to 2025 time frame.
Given the fact that the first HDD stored 4.4 MB on 50 24-inch disks, this is a truly stunning prospect. Imagine the storage capabilities of a 100 TB drive. 250,000,000 average MP3 songs or 250,000,000 12 MP photographs. Or 2000 completely filled Blu-ray discs or hundreds of 3D movies. While data volumes of content will continue to evolve, HDD capacity will evolve as well and it is reasonable to expect that single HDDs will be able to store the digital lives of multiple generations of a family. And even if the end of HAMR is reached, Seagate expects HDD technology to continue to evolve. Beyond HAMR, Seagate believes that patterned media will emerge and enable further capacity increases. If the current trend continues, then we should HDDs to remain with us as an affordable mass storage technology well beyond 2025. Flash will not be able to touch the value proposition HDDs in terms of price, capacity and performance, Re said.
According to the executive, Seagate has built HAMR prototype drives already, but the technology is not yet at a point where it could be commercialized. In fact, while HAMR is derived from a technology called “optical assisted magnetic recording” that was developed by Quinta, a company Seagate acquired in 1998, HAMR is a much more evolutionary approach. In contrast to Quinta’s optical read/write head, HAMR will use a traditional read/write head. The change to current HDD technology will be somewhat moderate, but also require companies to change the surface coating of the disks. Instead of a cobalt material, HAMR will use iron-platinum.
What will remain the same is the reliability of HDDs. Despite the massive increase of storage capacity that may be frightening to some users, given the amount of data that could be lost, Re said that there will be no major changes from today’s technology. The company will continue to drive reliability innovation through software and make backups easier.

Not without a massive increase is capacity and a drop in price.
not if you pirate alot of movies of games
So in other words, every other drive may still be DOA.
10 to 15 = 3 ?
I guess it would depend on how that sentence is sectioned...
With roughly 50x the potential of PMR, HAMR should lead the way beyond 100 TB drives (and possibly into the region of 200 – 300 TB in the 2020 to 2025 time frame).
would allow the title to be correct
With roughly 50x the potential of PMR, HAMR should lead the way beyond 100 TB drives (and possibly into the region of 200 – 300 TB) in the 2020 to 2025 time frame.
would make it a wrong title.
Curse you, ambiguous English language!
As for SSD replacing mechanical drives? I doubt this will happen until storage capacities, pricing, and reliability fall in line with the mechanical drives. Until then it is worth investing in non-ssd solutions.
Not without a massive increase is capacity and a drop in price.
... it just happen to be illegal to rip you own Blu-Ray disks...
We need some sort of system that would allow at least that!
something is going to have to change the only reason they can get away with it now is because people don't have a choice to shop elsewhere like with other products or services. Bandwidth costs have dropped for providers over 20% every year for the last 5 years so when they complain the bandwidth is costing them to much and that you should be capped or charges per bandwidth use they are BOLD OUT RIGHT Lying!
But so far so good, the price of SDD has come down, but maybe not as fast as we have hoped it will do...
The point is not to store a crap ton of MP3 files, just a comparison since that's a popular way to advertise storage devices on the market right now. Even if most consumers are using SSD by then this magnitude of storage capacity is very meaningful for the scientific and research communities. Hopefully Seagate and others are able to deliver what they estimate.
Given HDD manufactures records we will see a slow pace of doubling once we hit 4TB. 3TB drives are expected at the end of this year with 4TB by the end of next. That is already a year down. The highest I see in 3 years if that actually happens on time would be between 12-20TB's give or take. Of course they have plenty of technology designs to pursue unlike microprocessors, but the pace has definitely slowed since we hit 1TB. Once High Definition becomes more mainstream that will be the ultimate app that pushes forth consumer DEMAND for bigger hard drives and more space. My question is, how are SSD's going to fare. Right now they are taking this lag in the physical sector to build up their capacities, perfect their designs, improve their memory chips, and lower prices to build up a solid consumer base. I definitely see Hard Drive Wars back again in the next 3 years as the CPU Wars are sure to pick up next year.
I ask one thing, can we have more than 4GB dimms pl0x? I would greatly love to take advantage of the 192GB limit of Windows (even if yeah yeah we don't need it). Its been forever since memory has competed with anything other than faster clock speeds (usually just overclocked by manufactures). Now that people are starting to move to 64 bit OS'es this may actually happen. Oh things should get interesting in 3 years.