Seagate to start shipping HAMR drives at 32TB
Seagate has just updated its hard drive roadmap with its HAMR or heat-assisted magnetic recording drives. HAMR will be the company’s highest-capacity drive offering 32TB of storage.
There is still no information about the timeframe when the first HAMR drives will become available for consumers even though Seagate has already informed its cloud customers that they’ll soon receive 30TB HAMR qualification samples. It’s interesting to say that the updated Seagate roadmap was presented by Gianluca Romano, who is a Chief Financial Officer at Seagate. He announced the company’s first HAMR drive to carry 32TB of storage with 10 letters and 20 read/write heads.
The offer will afterward be expanded with a 36TB and eventually a 40TB HAMR drive version with all of them having the same 10-platter design. Additionally, Romano said that there is also a 50TB drive in the labs, but that one is at least a year away.
Current drives that use PMR or Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology will top out at 24TB and those will also become available pretty soon.
Lastly, Romano commented on the profitability of HAMR drives since the increase in capacity is strictly coming from areal density rather than more disks as it is the case with PMR drives. Considering HAMR technology uses a 10-platter design for 32, 36, and 40TB variants, the production cost will be lower allowing customers to save some money, even though these drives will be quite expensive.
