Seagate's mass-produced HAMR hard drives to debut at 32TB, followed by 40TB

[Daniel Sims]

Forward-looking: While most consumers are switching to ever-faster solid-state drives, some manufacturers have spent the last few years pushing the limits of hard drive capacity. Climbing over the 30TB mark requires new technology, which Seagate thinks will be ready later this year.

In a conference call this week, Seagate offered new details on its progress in bringing hard drives exceeding 30TB to the enterprise and consumer markets late this year. The first publicly-available drive using HAMR technology will hold 32TB, and the company plans to gradually raise that capacity soon after.

Maximum-size HAMR drives will consist of 10 platters, each platter on the 32TB model containing 3.2TB. HAMR technology will allow Seagate to steadily increase each platter's capacity, first to 3.6TB for a 36TB drive, then to 4TB for a 40TB drive. The company is currently testing 5TB platters which should make 50TB HDDs possible.

The method will save money because Seagate will be able to offer larger drives without adding platters, limiting the increase in their physical size. Releasing HAMR products with fewer platters also allows for more compact drives that still hold massive amounts of data. The largest drives will probably be almost solely for cloud data center clients, with lower tiers going to consumers. The technology could increase Seagate's profits while passing some savings to customers.

Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) briefly heats parts of each platter to increase the density of stored data while maintaining thermal and magnetic stability. Seagate is fully transitioning to the new tech while stopping traditional Perpendicular or Conventional Magnetic Recording (PRM/CMR) development at 2.4TB per platter.

The company's currently-available IronWolf Pro HDDs reach a maximum capacity of 22TB, but a 24TB HDD is coming later this year, which will be Seagate's final PMR drive. There will be a 28TB model using Shingled Magnetic Recording, but everything beyond that will be HAMR.

Western Digital is also using HAMR to push toward 30TB and 40TB on a timeline similar to Seagate's, but it's using stepping stones like OptiNAND to get there. In prior conference calls, Seagate said it aims to release 40TB HAMR drives next year or in 2025, with 50TB variants available in 2026. Earlier roadmaps set a goal of reaching 100TB by the end of the decade.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/99003-seagate-mass-produced-hamr-hard-drives-debut-32tb.html

 

[dipankar]

Reality is that Consumer HDD price haven't depreciated much for last 10 yrs as compared to DDR Ram or SSD. The advancement of technology is no use, if consumer unable to afford due to price per TB haven't reduced sufficient enough. Only corporate will be able to take advantage of this technologies. Gamers will think twice to buy HDD due to slow game loading performance & afforadability of SSD. Consumers which store large amount of media files like Bluray Movies, Hi-Res Audio, Hi-Res Photos etc will need large storage HDD.

 

[DDG4005]

I'll take two, please.

 

[KaitouX]

Hopefully the price drops fast like the 20TB ones, under $15/TB after one year like 20TB HDDs would be great. Maybe we will see HDDs start to go under $10/TB until 2026?

 

[p51d007]

I remember when 1TB drives became widely available...who's gonna need THAT much storage space! LOL

 

[SG736F6]

That is a lot of data to lose when it fails. Data recovery on that size of drive won't be cheap either.

 

[rmcrys]

Consumers have very low interest on bigger HDDs due to:

- price / TB isn't more attractive than smaller models
- speeds barely increased
- few people need so much space on one drive

Most consumers want an SSD for the OS, Apps and Games and then they have a NAS or external HDD with enough space for their multimedia and other files which don't need too frequent access or speed. I have myself a 4-Bay NAS with 4x 5TB 2.5" HDDs (for a total of 15 TB of free space on RAID ) which is more than enough and my requirements barely increased in 5 years. If I upgraded to 4x 14 TB 3.5" drives (relatively cheap these days) I would have a whooping 42 TB of space with RAID security for a relatively good price.

Increasing the space per disk is not truly interesting for home users if it doesn't come with an almost 1 GBps transfer rate.

 

[mbk34]

It's just crazy how much porn people want to store on their PCs these days.

 

[Shirley Dulcey]

Consumers have very low interest on bigger HDDs due to:

- price / TB isn't more attractive than smaller models
- speeds barely increased
- few people need so much space on one drive

Most consumers want an SSD for the OS, Apps and Games and then they have a NAS or external HDD with enough space for their multimedia and other files which don't need too frequent access or speed. I have myself a 4-Bay NAS with 4x 5TB 2.5" HDDs (for a total of 15 TB of free space on RAID ) which is more than enough and my requirements barely increased in 5 years. If I upgraded to 4x 14 TB 3.5" drives (relatively cheap these days) I would have a whooping 42 TB of space with RAID security for a relatively good price.

Increasing the space per disk is not truly interesting for home users if it doesn't come with an almost 1 GBps transfer rate.

600 MB/second is going to be the limit for a single drive unless a faster interface than SATA emerges. But you can get more read speed from a NAS if it uses multiple drives that are read in parallel. Hard drives can't do that kind of speed continuously in any case because of delays for head movement.

You would also need 10 gigabit or faster Ethernet to access your NAS; otherwise the speed of the LAN will be the limiting factor.

 

[mcnabney]

Consumers have very low interest on bigger HDDs due to:

- price / TB isn't more attractive than smaller models
- speeds barely increased
- few people need so much space on one drive

Most consumers want an SSD for the OS, Apps and Games and then they have a NAS or external HDD with enough space for their multimedia and other files which don't need too frequent access or speed. I have myself a 4-Bay NAS with 4x 5TB 2.5" HDDs (for a total of 15 TB of free space on RAID ) which is more than enough and my requirements barely increased in 5 years. If I upgraded to 4x 14 TB 3.5" drives (relatively cheap these days) I would have a whooping 42 TB of space with RAID security for a relatively good price.

Increasing the space per disk is not truly interesting for home users if it doesn't come with an almost 1 GBps transfer rate.

RAID is not security. It is uptime. A parity drive can in no way be considered backup.

 

[rmcrys]

RAID is not security. It is uptime. A parity drive can in no way be considered backup.

It depends on the point of view and narrow / wide sense of the matter:

Scenerio A) if I have 2 independent HDDs and one fails and I lose 50% or more of the information, it is bad
B) if it's a mirror and the same happens and I maintain 100% of my information, the scenario B is security / backup regarding A.

600 MB/second is going to be the limit for a single drive unless a faster interface than SATA emerges. But you can get more read speed from a NAS if it uses multiple drives that are read in parallel. Hard drives can't do that kind of speed continuously in any case because of delays for head movement.

You would also need 10 gigabit or faster Ethernet to access your NAS; otherwise the speed of the LAN will be the limiting factor.

It's a little bit the other way around: HDDs use mostly SATA because they don't need another interface. If HDDs were (much) faster, they could use NVMe / PCIe. HDDs are going server only until an easy and cheap to produce flash memory alternative appears.

 

[Aus spot]

To all the siloed comments. Yes there is a demand from consumers for this.

Games are not the world. Those of us that use spinners have the ability to use nve drives as well.

Redundancy and back up are things we do. Our storage is not kept on steam or a third party cloud. We may not have ability to run TB connections, but we do know how to use a NAS. Also serving a customer when the internet is slow is a non existent issue.

Porn is king, but comments trying to put yourself above others normally shows your own addiction. There’s a great wealth of digital content out there, that not your favourite pass time .

Affordable SSDs have not kept up with space demands.

I’ll be saving up for these drives.

 

[kiwigraeme]

To all the siloed comments. Yes there is a demand from consumers for this.

Games are not the world. Those of us that use spinners have the ability to use nve drives as well.

Redundancy and back up are things we do. Our storage is not kept on steam or a third party cloud. We may not have ability to run TB connections, but we do know how to use a NAS. Also serving a customer when the internet is slow is a non existent issue.

Porn is king, but comments trying to put yourself above others normally shows your own addiction. There’s a great wealth of digital content out there, that not your favourite pass time .

Affordable SSDs have not kept up with space demands.

I’ll be saving up for these drives.

Thanks over 1000 mix of Bluray , 4K UHD remuxes - could see it as a write to once and hook up to media server - with a NAS hooked at to PC - 4 16-18TB drives - as main source

 

[dalpilot]

Consumers have very low interest on bigger HDDs due to:

- price / TB isn't more attractive than smaller models
- speeds barely increased
- few people need so much space on one drive

Most consumers want an SSD for the OS, Apps and Games and then they have a NAS or external HDD with enough space for their multimedia and other files which don't need too frequent access or speed. I have myself a 4-Bay NAS with 4x 5TB 2.5" HDDs (for a total of 15 TB of free space on RAID ) which is more than enough and my requirements barely increased in 5 years. If I upgraded to 4x 14 TB 3.5" drives (relatively cheap these days) I would have a whooping 42 TB of space with RAID security for a relatively good price.

Increasing the space per disk is not truly interesting for home users if it doesn't come with an almost 1 GBps transfer rate.

My media library continues to expand and currently have over 8 TB of media 1,000s of movies, 10,000 TV episodes and a decent sized music library. Record almost anything that looks interesting on streaming services and sort it out later whether it's any good or not. Refuse to "buy" a movie from any service any more and then lose the show/movies because the service I bought it from only had the "rights" to it for 5 or 10 years and can no longer watch movies I've "bought". And, yes, I have 3 backups of everything - two on site and one off site (learned the hard way when I lost a few movies in a house fire). Also, Gigabit ethernet and Sata III is more than fast enough for streaming my library through the house.

 

[toooooot]

10 year reliability when?
These are often used for stuff people like to keep for a long time, home video, photos, occasionally played large size games.
They have to be more reliable. And it is not like they are getting much cheaper.
Start working on reliability.

 

[mcnabney]

10 year reliability when?
These are often used for stuff people like to keep for a long time, home video, photos, occasionally played large size games.
They have to be more reliable. And it is not like they are getting much cheaper.
Start working on reliability.

It would be really nice for drives to be more reliable, but I think that consumers have moderated the risk created by unreliable drives with excessive duplication of data.
/I run Stablebit on my server and all data is either duplicated or key data is triplicated
//and I backup all of my pics and videos to an external drive
///and I backup data to older bare drives stored in a box at my wife's office
////oh, and Amazon is backing up all of my photos (a few hundred thousand)

 

[rmcrys]

That is fine for your use case. But if you do incremental backups of large files frequently or even need to access huge files as raw 4K videos, a gigabit connection takes ages.

My use case: I have NAS but every 3 months I make a backup of the newest changes (around 3 TB) to an external HDD (that I leave on a friend's house in case I get robbed). It takes AGES... as the external HDD (or gigabit Ethernet) is too slow. With an SSD attached to the NAS over a 5 gbps USB-A, it makes the backup noticeable faster (because my RAID can read much faster than the USB bus, so the USB bus is the limiting factor)

 

[dalpilot]

That is fine for your use case. But if you do incremental backups of large files frequently or even need to access huge files as raw 4K videos, a gigabit connection takes ages.

My use case: I have NAS but every 3 months I make a backup of the newest changes (around 3 TB) to an external HDD (that I leave on a friend's house in case I get robbed). It takes AGES... as the external HDD (or gigabit Ethernet) is too slow. With an SSD attached to the NAS over a 5 gbps USB-A, it makes the backup noticeable faster (because my RAID can read much faster than the USB bus, so the USB bus is the limiting factor)

I do onsite and off site backup as soon as I edit a new video file - TV shows are around a Gigabyte each and movies (1080P) around 3-4 GB. My other files (what little I do) are backed up every day and my program files (Word, Excel, PP) which I barely use rarely need backup (only when there's an update). I'm retired and there's very little I do anymore that is of any consequence to merit backup. If I ever "lose" my NAS (I don't do RAID) it will probably take all day (or two) to restore a backup to the NAS (although I already have a 2.5G connection on my PC and router so if I ever upgrade the NAS it willh have at least a 2.5G connection.