A 100TB Hard Drive!!?? HOW??

How does Seagate's new HAMR technology enable 100TB on a single drive?!

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In this video we're covering Seagate's latest hard drive technology, HAMR. In a recent earnings call with Seagate's CFO, there was mention of the latest updates to their hard drive roadmap, embracing what they call heat-assited magnetic recording, or HAMR technology, being used in their upcoming high-capacity drives. Back in 2018 Seagate announced that it used it's HAMR technology to build the worlds first 16TB enterprise drive in a standard 3.5" form factor, the largest capacity hard drive ever produced. Those were for internal testing only, but that shows how long Seagate has been investing in HAMR tech, with the super secret squirrel engineering going back earlier than that.

The company is starting its large-capacity HAMR journey with a massive 32TB drive, with a 50TB version already in the works in their labs. While Seagate didn't provide an exact timeline for consumer availability, at the end of this past April they begun shipping 30TB HAMR samples to select cloud customers. According to the CFO, Seagate's HAMR business is growing faster than anticipated. Although it won't have a signifigant impact on the company's profit and loss sheets for a few quarters, the progress is impressive. The first larger capacity HAMR drive will feature a 10-platter design, offering a whopping 32 terabytes of storage with 20 read/write heads, meaning 3.2TB per disk. Following this, Seagate has plans for a 36TB version, and eventually, a massive 40TB variant, all using the same 10-platter design. There's even a 50TB version currently being developed in their labs, but we might have to wait at least a year, if not more, for its release.

Back in 2021 during an analyst meeting Seagate's SVP of Marketing Jeff Fochtman stated: "With HAMR technology, it allows us to jump in steps of 4 terabytes, 6 terabytes, or even 10 terabytes at a time." Going on to say: "With the areal density CAGR just introduced, we have a path to 10TB per disk by 2030. This then represents our outlook for technology limits over the next 10 to 15 years."

What does that put their future drive capacity at? Well, with 10TB's per platter and current high capacity HAMR drives being designed around a 10 platter setup, that means 100TB's per 3.5" drive! Add in a couple of more platters in a possible slightly larger form factor, and that takes it to 120TB's per drive! So, what does the timeline look like for HAMR? With the 30TB testing units now being shipped out, that puts the 40TB units between 2024 and 2025 with the 50+TB and even 100TB units somewhere around 2026. But what about Seagate's current drives using perpendicular magnetic recording, or PMR? Well, according to the CFO they will reach their maximum capacity at about 24TB, which will be hitting the market soon. Beyond that, Seagate will adopt shingled magnetic recording or SMR for 28TB drives, and then HAMR for 30TB and beyond.

[stepbruv]

Finally a hard drive that can fit all my browser search history

[BrandonWombacher-cpuh]

100TB is insane. I never thought they would make storage sizes that big. 😮

[drescherjm]

I expect these to have enterprise pricing meaning they will cost several thousand dollars each. Even at work where I have several hundred TB I will probably still have to stick with smaller drives as this is outside of my typical budget for increased storage once you factor in you likely need at least 4 at a time for a RAID.

[HollowBrown-en]

For that size, it would have to be SSD. Or a free of charge restoration of data in case the drive fails.

[scooterjes]

I'll bet for pure large data archiving those drives will be good I just wonder what kind of throughput they will have. One other bad thing about drives that big is it is a pretty big deal if 1 drive fails a 10 or a 20 is bad but 100?

[jackmcslay]

I don't think I'll need a 100tb drive any time soon but the prospect of lower cost drives for home users is pretty good, with games as big as they are nowadays, as 4+TB SSDs not only are expensive but even those might lack space for game collections with many AAA titles.

[przemekbundy]

after all, they can make bigger plates. and more plates in the disk. capacity won't be a problem.

[Michael-itgb]

Gladly get 100TB drive.
Get dissapointed that it will fail soon because its Seagate.

[jayrbriones]

Hey!!! Can you give that thing as a gift to me?