Over the years, there have been debates over who is the future, HDD mechanical hard drive or SSD solid state drive, and whether SSD can completely eliminate HDD, but there has been no answer. This just shows that the two hard drives are not incompatible, but complement each other: one is good at large capacity and low cost, and the other is better at high performance. In fact, in data centers and enterprise environments, about 90% of data is stored in mechanical hard drives, and its long-lasting stability is beyond the reach of SSDs.
To this end, major manufacturers such as Seagate have been committed to the research and development of new mechanical storage technologies for many years, such asHAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording), which everyone often hears, took Seagate more than 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to finally put it into mass production and practical use.
This is the new Mozaic3+ platform, which was officially released at the beginning of this year.
The idea of HAMR is to increase storage density, thereby doubling the total capacity of the hard drive. The basic principle is to reduce the size of magnetic particles and squeeze them closer, so that the areal density is greatly increased.
When the platter of a mechanical hard disk rotates at high speed, the magnetic polarity of the magnetic particles will be written and rewritten. The smaller the particles, the greater the surface density.
The problem is that as density increases, the risk of the particles losing their magnetism or being remagnetized by neighboring reads and writes increases. If two magnetic particles are placed too close together, they can become unstable.
Seagate has researched new platinum alloy media that can magnetize smaller particles, but it cannot operate at reduced temperature. It requires using a laser beam to quickly heat a small spot on the media so that the particles can be magnetized and then cooled and stabilized.
12nm process integrated controller, magnetic core, superlattice platinum alloy dielectric, nanophoton laser, photon funnel, quantum antenna, seventh-generation spin reader, plasma writer... It is this series of complex and advanced components that Seagate finally made HAMR technology a reality and is the only company to commercialize this technology.
The Magic Box 3+ platform based on HAMR technology is the first to have a single disk capacity exceed 3TB, making Seagate's flagship enterprise-class hard drive Exos Galaxy hard drive exceed 30TB and has been supplied in batches.
In the future, the capacity of a single disk will continue to exceed 4TB and 5TB, and the capacity of a single disk can easily exceed 40TB and 50TB!
For enterprises and data centers, a single hard drive with a larger capacity means that under the same demand, the number of hard drives can be greatly reduced, thereby saving space, cost, and being more environmentally friendly.
If all 16TB hard drives are upgraded to 30TB hard drives, the power consumption per TB can be reduced by 45%.
Especially under the wave of AI, data continues to grow massively and the demand for storage is unprecedentedly high. HAMR is like a timely rain.
Regarding the reliability of HAMR hard drives, Seagate believes that they can be comparable to traditional hard drives, and their service life is still about 10 years.
Seagate said:"This technology (HAMR) is not a simple technological upgrade, but a new platform and a turning point. It will lead us to a broader and better place."
"With the advent of the AI era, solid-state drives and mechanical hard drives will coexist for a long time. Each storage technology and media has its own value."