Products You May Like
Seagate hit another milestone in its long-running journey of developing heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) hard drives when it signed an unnamed cloud service provider. The storage device company mentioned what appears to be a big win in an SEC filing. The HAMR drive has been many years in the making and we’ve kept an eye on its progress. Now, as 2024 comes to a close, it looks like the vaunted HAMR 32TB hard drive is ready for mass production, having received the confidence of a large customer.
Seagate offers a 30TB drive that uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR), but the new 32TB drive uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which does not match the performance of conventional magnetic recording. At the moment, it isn’t quite clear (as Ars Technica notes) whether the 32TB drives are Exos M drives or Mozaic 3+ drives. The difference is important for potential customers, especially the general public, because only the Exos M drives are compatible with current systems. We’ll update when Seagate weighs in.
SMR gets its name from the way it creates higher areal densities. Rather than reduce bit size, SMR pushes the tracks together to overlap like shingles. The tracks are squeezed during the write process to accommodate more data than traditionally possible. The reader technology can read the data without additional errors, despite the shingled structure.
Seagate’s main competitor for the capacity title is Western Digital, which has its own 32TB storage drive. Western Digital got there with an 11-platter design, which is one more platter than drives had been using to this point. Western Digital’s 32TB drives use SMR technology, like the Seagate drive.
Credit: Toshiba
Western Digital announced its 32TB SMR drive in October, giving it a short lead on Seagate. The drive is aimed at data centers, but the company also announced drives for mere mortals at the same time. Those include the 26TB Ultrastar DC HC590 and the 26TB WD Gold Sata drive. Both of those drives use conventional magnetic recording, however.
Another major player in the storage industry, Toshiba, is also taking aim at the highest capacity throne. Toshiba is working on a HAMR drive that will pass the 30TB mark, and it is also developing a drive that uses microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology. Look for those to arrive sometime in 2026.