Seagate’s monetary reports have actually been suggesting impending mass production of HAMR HDDs for a couple of years now, and it appears like the await these drives to appear in retail is lastly at an end. The Seagate Exos item household is getting a 30TB capability point, thanks to making use of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) innovation. The business talked with journalism recently about the Mozaic 3+ platform — their very first high-volume HAMR platform — and how it sets the phase for fast areal density scaling over the next couple of years.
Seagate’s brand-new Exos 30TB HDDs utilize plates with an areal density of 3TB per plate, and Seagate has strategies to scale that up at a rate of as much as 20% generation-over-generation in the next couple of years (compared to the 8% rate that CMR HDD capabilities have actually been growing at in the last years or two). The business suggested that volume deliveries are occurring this quarter to hyperscalers. Seagate is observing that the typical client updating from a 16TB standard magnetic recording platform to the brand-new 30TB+ HDDs can nearly double the capability of their server racks in the very same footprint, as the brand-new drives are drop-in replacements. This brings TCO advantages, especially in regards to power usage. The business is even measuring that – the Exos X16’s typical power usage of 9.44 W equates to 0.59 W/ TB. The brand-new Exos 30TB’s comparable number is a bit greater at 10.5 W, however that equates to a 40% power cost savings on a per-TB basis at 0.35 W/ TB.
The business worried upon the reality that HAMR required a host of other developments organized under the brand-new Mozaic 3+ tag in order to accomplish the areal density development allowing the brand-new Exos household. These consist of:
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- Plates utilizing brand-new Pt-Fe alloy
- Plasmonic author
- 7 th Gen. spintronic reader
- 12nm integrated controller
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Areal density gains are mainly driven by smaller sized grain sizes in the magnetic media. Nevertheless, tradition magnetic plate media is not steady at extremely little grain sizes. Together with Showa-Denko, Seagate has actually established a superlattice iron-platinum structure with increased magnetic coercivity to permit accurate and steady information recording. The HAMR procedure needs warming up of the grain in order to modify its state, and Seagate has actually accomplished this utilizing a nanophotonic laser that is vertically incorporated into the plasmonic author sub-system. The reading head has actually likewise required to progress in order to take advantage of the smaller sized grains. All of these developments collaborate thanks to a freshly established controller (developed on TSMC’s 12nm procedure) that Seagate declares to provide 3x the efficiency of existing services.
Seagate anticipates the Mozaic platform to result in 5TB/platter as early as 2028.
Areal density scaling is among the essential elements in dealing with the HDD capability concern. One element that this scaling has actually not attended to is the IOPS/TB metric, where SSDs remain in a better location to make the most of developments in host user interface innovation. The Mozaic platform is orthogonal to currently-used HDD innovations such as double actuators and shingled-magnetic recording. Fringe benefits can be obtained from those, however the IOPS/TB metric scaling is an element that requires industry-wide efforts to resolve to keep HDDs appropriate in more application locations.
Seagate deals with suppliers such as Showa-Denko for the plates and TDK for the recording heads. A few of the Mozaic 3+ developments have actually been collectively established with them. While the precise information of the joint advancement are private, Seagate suggested that they have a time-limited unique usage for these technological developments. If, and when, other HDD suppliers transfer to HAMR, it appears that Seagate has a healthy result in draw on with regard to these core HAMR platform parts. The business is likewise anticipating the Mozaic 3+ innovation to resolve use-cases as as NAS, and video/ imaging markets. It is just a matter of time before HAMR relocations from Exos to the IronWolf and SkyHawk households.