With the price increase and shortage of memory chips, traditional HDD hard drives have also exploded, and AI data centers have extremely high requirements for storage capacity. Competition in this market is even less than that of memory, mainly played by Seagate and Western Digital. The financial report released by Seagate a few days ago was also explosive. Revenue was US$3.11 billion, a year-on-year increase of 44%, gross profit margin reached 46.5%, and net profit was US$748 million, a year-on-year increase of 120%.

Seagate shipped 199EB capacity hard drives last quarter, a year-on-year increase of 39%. 88% of the shipments were for data centers, generating 80% of the revenue (it seems that it is not as profitable as consumer-grade products).

The main problem faced by hard drive manufacturers is also the rising demand for HDD hard drives. However, there are also some technical differences between Seagate and Western Digital in this area. Western Digital hopes to increase the number of hard drive disks.From the current 10 and 12 discs to 14 discs,It also hopes to launch high-bandwidth hard drives and use dual drive arms to further improve hard drive performance.

Seagate's focus is different. They don't agree with continuing to pile up the number of discs or creating multi-drive-arm hard drives, although Seagate also has such technology. They have also launched MACH.2 dual-drive-arm hard drives before.

Seagate is currently more optimistic about increasing the density of hard drives, that is, relying on technologies such as HAMR to increase the density of a single disk.Three generations of HAMR technology have been launched. The current second-generation technology Mozaic 4+ can achieve a capacity of 4.4TB on a single disk, and 10 disks can make a hard drive with a capacity of 44TB. It will become the main shipment of HAMR by the end of this year.

The next generation Mozaic 5 can achieve a single disk capacity of 5TB.10 disks for 50TB capacity, certification is expected to begin later in 2027.

Of course, these are not the end of HAMR. Seagate and Western Digital announced a 100TB roadmap many years ago. At that time, they planned to realize it in 2030. However, HAMR technology has been delayed in recent years. Seagate’s latest plan is to achieve 10TB per disk in 2033.Commercial shipment of 100TB hard drives in 2033.