Seagate Preps 2nd Generation HAMR HDDs with 30TB Capacity (with some delays)

Lightwreather · September 23, 2021

Summary

I mean, the title's a summary ? But sure: Seagate delays adoption of HAMR for high-volume drives.

Quotes

Quote

Seagate has been a strong proponent of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for years and has even shipped thousands of such hard drives to select customers. But apparently the company still does not have plans to make the first generation of its HAMR-based HDDs a high-volume product. Apparently, the company is already working on its second-generation HAMR drives that it expects to roll out to a mass market.

"We have a 20TB HAMR that we actually started to sell December last year, […] we are just producing enough quantity that we can sell to our main customers so that they get familiar with the new drive," said Gianluca Romano, Seagate's CFO, at Citi 2021 Global Technology Virtual Conference (via SeekingAlpha). We are developing our second-generation HAMR drive that will be probably around 30TB. That is the drive that we want to ramp in volume."

Romano did not disclose when the company expects its second-eneration HAMR platform to hit the market. Yet, keeping in mind that Seagate plans to launch a 50TB HDD in FY2025 (which ends in mid-2025), it is reasonable to expect the company to launch its 30TB hard drives sometime before that (think calendar year 2023 or early 2024). On the one hand, this means that Seagate still has aggressive plans for HAMR, but on the other hand, this means that high-volume roll out of this technology will be delayed by quite a bit.

My thoughts

Well, Seagate's developing their 2nd gen HAMR drives.... Nice. Ofc, the majority of these drives will almost certainly go to datacenters (that is their targeted market after all). Keeping in mind that these are still a relatively new technology and considering these are HDDs, I don't really expect there to be much of a performance bump. But I still do hope that these eventually trickle down to consumers, so that data horders and the ever increasing demand for more storage can be satiated.

Sources

Tom's hardware

Seeking alpha

Bombastinator · September 23, 2021

29 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Summary

I mean, the title's a summary ? But sure: Seagate delays adoption of HAMR for high-volume drives.

Quotes

My thoughts

Well, Seagate's developing their 2nd gen HAMR drives.... Nice. Ofc, the majority of these drives will almost certainly go to datacenters (that is their targeted market after all). Keeping in mind that these are still a relatively new technology and considering these are HDDs, I don't really expect there to be much of a performance bump. But I still do hope that these eventually trickle down to consumers, so that data horders and the ever increasing demand for more storage can be satiated.

Sources

Tom's hardware

Seeking alpha

I’m getting a visual of an older man in tighty whities and a wife beater sitting on the floor of a closet mostly filled with old Polaroids of cats yelling “don’t look at me!” My brain seems to do its own thing though.