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Seagate has updated its hard drive roadmap, hinting at a capacious future as it switches to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for its highest-capacity drives. The company revealed its plans in a recent earnings call, stating that it will begin its HAMR quest at 32TB and already has a 50TB version working in its labs. Unfortunately, it didn’t provide a timeframe for when we might see the first HAMR drive arrive for consumers. The company has already talked about shipping 30TB HAMR qualification samples to some of its cloud customers, so the real deal can’t be too far off.
Seagate’s roadmap was updated by Gianluca Romano, its Chief Financial Officer. The earnings call was transcribed by Seeking Alpha via Tom’s Hardware. Romano said the company’s HAMR business is growing quicker than expected, but it won’t affect its P&L sheets for a few quarters, as it won’t be shipping enough volume to impact the bottom line significantly. He said the company’s first HAMR drive would be 32TB with 10 platters and 20 read/write heads, so 3.2TB per disk. It will follow up with a 36TB version and eventually a 40TB version, all with the same 10-platter design. Romano also said there is currently a 50TB version in the labs. But given the timing involved, that sounds at least a year away, if not more.
Doubling back to its current drives that use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), Romano said that technology will top out at 24TB, which will be coming out soon. Beyond that, it’ll use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) at 28TB, then HAMR for 30TB and beyond. Romano even mentioned which customers will require which capacities. He stated that only cloud storage providers would need 40TB, with enterprise OEMs using 30TB. Video and image hoarders will need 20TB or so; the rest would use lower capacities.
What’s especially notable about Romano’s comments is he remarks on how profitable HAMR will be because the capacity increases will come strictly from areal density, rather than adding more disks, as with PMR drives. Since it can use the same 10-platter design for 32, 36, and 40TB, it will save on the bill of materials, allowing it to pass some of that cost saving on to customers. However, these drives will still be quite expensive, so it will likely be years before there are affordable versions for consumers.
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