A step forward for those companies that need a storage system capable of accumulating a huge and bulky amount of data, necessary for the day-to-day running of their organization. Seagate, which is one of the world’s leading hard drive manufacturers, has announced that it will expand the capacity of hard drives thanks to HAMR technology.
HAMR stands for a innovative heat-assisted magnetic recording technology. For the one that uses laser beams capable of momentarily heating the surface of the disk before the head records the bit.
This laser causes a gradual heating of the material at specific points, from a small size up to 450 degrees. Later, everything cools down to room temperature in just a nanosecond.
By this way, the head engraves the bit on a more stable surface and allows bits to be stored in spaces that are closer together without interfering with each other by remaining magnetically stable.
The HAMR technology of Seagate hard drives -which will also have a new type of coating-, will help to have a greater density of data in the same space. Being able to even store up to five times more data on the same hard drive.
Seagate has already set a release date for these “new” HAMR-based hard drives. 3.5-inch HDD mechanical hard drives that will have a capacity of up to 30TB and will come out on sale next June.
This is thus a historical desire on the part of professionals eager to have larger capacity hard drives despite the evolution of these in recent years. With the use of HAMR technology, a solution will finally be found to the growing global need for storage to be able to store and access huge amounts of data never seen before.
For the moment, and until its official launch, Seagate has already sent some of these hard drives to a selection of its customers so that they can test them and then proceed to mass production.
More news from Seagate
For this first and second quarter of 2023, Seagate still plans to rely on conventional magnetic recording technologies to push hard drive capacities to new heights.
The American company plans to launch new 10-disc models with perpendicular or conventional magnetic recording (CMR/PMR), which will include 2.2 terabytes on each disk for a total capacity of 22TB.
Also, with the slightly slower shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, Seagate will offer 24TB models to customers who want to use it for certain applications.
The big difference is that second-generation HAMR hard drives will be able to hold 5 terabytes of data on a single platter, while the first mass-produced HAMR hard drives will offer terabytes of nominal storage capacity.
Seagate has also announced that HAMR hard drives with 40TB of storage are expected in 2024 or 2025, while 50TB models could arrive in 2026
