Seagate: HAMR Could Lower Costs of Mid-Range HDDs

Seagate is going to be the first maker of hard drives to start using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology later this year, but initially leading-edge HDDs will be available inside Seagate's Lyve storage systems as well as to select customers. But over time the technology will be used considerably wider and could even be used to reduce costs of mid-range HDDs. 

The main purpose of HAMR is to increase areal density of hard drive platters and eventually enable HDD makers to design storage devices capable featuring capacities of 50 TB by 2026. But before such drives hit the market, Seagate will need to perfect the technology and the best way to do that is to ramp up production of HAMR HDDs. 

"[HAMR] is not only about the highest capacity point," said David Mosley, CEO of Seagate, at Bernstein 2020 Operational Decisions Conference, reports SeekingAlpha. "If we can save a disk and two heads in a 16 TB drive, we will look at doing that as well. So, it's really across the whole portfolio, which is why we think that this platform play is so important. We can introduce HAMR into the same platform. The cost increases are really nominal." 

Another interesting thing that HAMR enables Seagate to do is to leapfrog its competitors with microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) and similar technologies that cannot match HAMR in terms of areal density. When asked about bringing 24TB HDDs to the market rather sooner than later (i.e., at the same time with 22TB drives), Mr. Mosley answered that the company already has components that allow it to build a 24TB hard drive. 

"I am not going to announce the 24TB product just yet, but that's definitely the goal of HAMR, is to be able to go well beyond that," said the head of Seagate. "That's what we can do with components that are in our labs right now. We just have to build the right solutions for the customers. And these are tough applications, so we have to make sure that we get it right." 

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Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.