INTELLIGENT DATACENTRES
Seagate announces breakthrough 30TB + hard drives marking inflection point
S eagate announced a milestone that marks a new era in the storage industry . The company launched the Mozaic 3 + hard drive platform – which incorporates Seagate ’ s implementation of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording , HAMR technology . The launch herald ’ s areal density of 3TB + per platter – and a roadmap that will achieve 4TB + and 5TB + per platter in the coming years .
The Mozaic 3 + platform powers Seagate ’ s flagship Exos product family , with newly announced , industry-capacity points of 30TB and beyond . Exos 30TB + products are shipping in volume this quarter to hyperscale cloud customers .
Seagate ’ s areal density innovation , which increases the number of bits that can be stored on a platter , addresses common industry pain points . Mozaic 3 + enables customers to store more data in the same floor space than ever before . Upgrading from a 16TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording , PMR drive , the average capacity in large-scale data centres to an Exos 30TB Mozaic 3 + technology drive effectively doubles capacity in the same footprint .
The platform uses roughly the same material components as PMR hard drives while dramatically increasing capacity , allowing data centres to significantly lower storage acquisition and operational
Exos 30TB Mozaic 3 + technology drive
costs , including a 40 % improvement in per terabyte power consumption .
Mozaic 3 + can also help customers achieve sustainability goals , a top priority for large-scale data centres , by offering a 55 % reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte , when comparing a 30TB Mozaic 3 + drive with a traditional 16TB PMR drive .
Seagate is experiencing strong demand from data centre customers that are expected to complete qualification of Mozaic 3 + and move into volume ramp by end of this quarter . A cloud service provider is focused on shifting the majority of Seagateprovided drives to Mozaic 3 +, reflecting their confidence in the technology .
“ Seagate is the world ’ s only hard drive manufacturer with the areal density capability to get to 3TB per platter and with 5TB on the horizon ,” said Dave Mosley , Seagate ’ s CEO .
Fundamental physics of higher-density recording requires smaller media grain size at nanoscale . The challenge here is that smaller grains are more unstable . Legacy alloys do not provide sufficient magnetic stability for effective and reliable storage . In Mozaic 3 + hard drives , the media alloy uses a pioneering iron-platinum superlattice structure , which significantly increases the magnetic coercivity of disk media . This allows for precise data writing and unprecedented bit stability .
Since the media are made magnetically harder to prevent instability , the design requires a revolutionary writer , a marvel of miniaturisation and precision engineering that is Seagate ’ s unique implementation of HAMR . Anchoring this technology is a nanophotonic laser , which produces an infinitesimal heat spot on the media surface to reliably write the data .
Seagate plans to vertically integrate the nanophotonic laser into the plasmonic writer sub-system . Developing this unique laser technology in-house for Mozaic 3 + will ensure even greater efficiency and yield to support rapid scaling of volume production . •
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS 4545