A few months ago we talked about the new Seagate hard drives with HAMR technology, and we saw those new storage solutions coming to market with 30TB capacity. It is not the first time that we have talked about this technology, in fact we have known about it for years, but it must be recognized that it offers significant improvements and that it has become a benchmark within the sector.
In case someone is lost, I remind you that HAMR is the acronym in English for heat assisted magnetic recording, and refers to the technology used by these Seagate hard drives to record data on each of the platters that make up a storage unit. Thanks to it, it is possible to increase the density of bits per plate, which translates into a greater storage capacity with a smaller number of plates.
To avoid problems at the level of magnetic and thermal stability of the data when they are so close together, a consequence of this higher bit density per plate, this technology uses a small laser diode that is connected to each read-write head, and that is in charge of briefly heating a small spot on the disk to change the magnetic polarity of it before proceeding to the recording of the bit. The heating and cooling process barely lasts a nanosecond, so the unit’s working temperature is not compromised.
Seagate has confirmed that it has already begun to supply commercial units of its hard drives with HAMR technology, and that these have a capacity of up to 32TB storage. This is not equivalent to a launch, and it is not equivalent to a general availability of said units, but it is good news that confirms that the company has not forgotten its roadmap, and that it could end up fulfilling that objective that it set for itself to start the mass production of these hard drives by early 2024.
We know that Seagate is using drives with a density of 3.2TB of storage capacity per platter, which brings us to a total of ten platters in the 32TB drives. However, it is also confirmed that the company has managed to develop platters with capacities of 3.6 TB, 4 TB and up to 5 TB, which means that a hard drive with ten platters could offer a capacity of up to 50 TB.
