Seagate’s Massive 30 TB+ HAMR HDDs Aiming Launch In Second Half of 2023
The new HAMR platform by Seagate is anticipated to increase the ability to stretch the lengths of memory capacity. And the company does not plan to stop at 30 TB. Seagate is looking towards 50 TB of storage or higher. The company explains in their roadmap that they will look at offering 30TB and above starting in 2023 but have not explained the length of time to achieve 50 TB or higher. The first generation of the HAMR memory platform has been floating to specific clients and in the Lyve storage systems for some time, but the second generation HAMR drives will be available to all, with a small caveat. — David Mosley, chief executive of Seagate, during the company’s recent earnings call. Shipments to customers of the second-gen HAMR HDDs with a capacity of 30TB or more will not be shipped in mass quantities starting in 2023. The company is expected only to send to select customers in the data center markets, pushing the availability for everyone until a later date. Seagate’s HAMR technology alters the HDD memory, affecting media, magnetic layer, reading and writing heads, controller, actuators, and several other components of a hard drive. There is speculation that creating new parts will be more challenging to produce and more expensive for clients. HDDs with a memory capacity of 30TB and higher that use a single actuator have a unique IOPS-per-TB performance. The performance lowers as the capacity increases, which alters responsiveness and performance. Users utilizing the HDDs for standard datacenters or enterprise-level NAS systems will benefit from waiting until memory drives of a similar capacity and offering a dual-actuator architecture become more widely available. News Source: Seeking Alpha
