We agree – hard drives isn’t the most interesting topic in the tech industry. But when there is a new technology that will significantly change the landscape it is worth looking at. In a leaked product roadmap of the upcoming Seagate next-gen hard drives, it has been revealed that they are working on a new technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which promises to deliver significantly larger storage capacities.
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The product range is listed as the Exos 20+, which are HAMR drives set to feature a 20TB capacity. That’s right – a compact hard drive with 20TB capacity. According to company documents, they will release HAMR HDDs with even greater capacities, although exact sizes are still unknown.
In terms of backwards compatibility it is expected that the new HAMR drives will be a simple plug and play and will be capable of plugging into the existing 3.5-inch bays on motherboards. This indicates that the power consumption will be similar to current technologies, meaning it won’t consume more than 12W of power.
The HAMR drives will feature a 7200RPM spindle speed which translates to read/write speeds of more than the 260 megabytes per second of current hard drives.
Heat-assisted magnetic recording works by temporarily heating the disk material during writing, which makes it much more receptive to magnetic effects and allows writing on much smaller regions (and much higher levels of data on a disk). It originated in 2013, but there were many doubts about being able to control the effects in mass market drives.
The regions being written must be heated in a tiny area – small enough that diffraction prevents the use of normal laser focused heating – and requires a heating, writing and cooling cycle of less than 1 nanosecond, while also controlling the effects of repeated spot-heating on the drive platters, the drive-to-head contact, and the adjacent magnetic data which must not be affected.
We look forward to see where the technology takes us in the future.
