After Seagate itself created a lot of buzz around HAMR and its own implementation of the technology, HAMR HDDs seem to be effectively becoming available in volume.
Seagate has successfully completed qualification tests for its HAMR drives with volume customers, including an undisclosed major cloud provider. With those tests completed, the door opens for volume shipping of HAMR drives. Seagate plans to do that in the coming weeks. Although the hard drive manufacturer did not announce anything officially, general availability of HAMR within the Seagate portfolio seems a logical next step.
HAMR and Mozaic
HAMR stands for Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording and is a technique for cramming more bits and bytes onto a single hard drive. HAMR is a huge leap forward in HDD technology, which hasn’t advanced much faster than incrementally in recent decades. Seagate developed its own implementation of HAMR under the collective name Mozaic3+.
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Seagate’s HAMR drives creep toward mass production
Mozaic3+ contains all the innovations needed to make HAMR a success. Think new materials for the disk, special lasers and temperatures of 400 degrees and more. We already went into more detail in this piece. The technology makes it possible to cram three terabytes and more onto a single drive. HDDs consist of multiple drives, so capacities of 30 TB and more are in the offing.
Even with the technology developed, that’s easier said than done. Seagate has been talking about HAMR for a long time, and the technology has been nearly ready each time, but volume production has been lacking. So now that is about to change. The drives will go to data center customers in large volumes, with subsequent availability to the larger public in the form of the Exos M 32 TB. When that time comes, and how much the drives will cost, remains unclear for now.