Seagate is cautiously starting the delivery of its first hard drives with a capacity of 44 TB, built on the enhanced Mozaic 4+ technology suite. The company’s timing for this reveal is no coincidence.
Seagate is delivering the first 44 TB HDDs to two unnamed hyperscale customers. The hard drives utilize Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). This is a relatively new technology that allows for significantly higher data density within the classic 3.5-inch form factor.
Not much is known about the 44 TB drives, other than that they are reportedly 7,200 RPM drives with fairly standard specifications for high-performance HDDs, aside from the capacity. We don’t know the read and write speeds for certain, but a figure around 300 MB/s is likely in the ballpark.
New Mozaic
Seagate is building the HDDs on its Mozaic 4+ platform, which succeeds Mozaic 3+. Mozaic is Seagate’s name for the combination of technologies that makes HAMR possible.
To achieve high storage density via HAMR, tiny parts of the hard drive itself must be heated to 400 degrees Celsius in less than a nanosecond using an extremely focused laser. This is necessary to magnetize the platters on a minute scale and thus retain the bits and bytes.
Such precision requires internal innovation, as we previously explained in detail. Mozaic 4+ is an evolution of Mozaic 3+, which forms the basis of the 30 TB drives that have been widely available since the middle of last year.
In the new HDD, Seagate packs ten physical platters with 4.4 TB of capacity per individual disk. This brings the total capacity to 44 TB.
Showing off against WD
The drives are not yet generally available and information is scarce. Seagate is choosing to communicate about this now, and not by accident. After all, Western Digital announced its own 40 TB HDD last month. However, that one is built with a very advanced version of SMR (shingled magnetic recording, where data overlaps in blocks, and an entire block must be rewritten when a single byte is modified).
De 44 TB-drive van Seagate met HAMR werkt met een equivalent van Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). Bij CMR overlappen data elkaar niet. De HAMR-drive van Seagate is dus in theorie een pak sneller dan de UltraSMR-drive van Western Digital. Seagate wilde dat vermoedelijk even aanstippen. Niet dat Seagate vies is van een hoge capaciteit zonder HAMR: de fabrikant zette zelf pas 32 TB-drives gebaseerd op klassieke technologie in de markt.