Seagate Ships First 30TB HAMR HDDs

The race for bragging rights in the aerial density war is heating up; pardon the pun. Seagate has announced it’s begun shipping qualification samples of 30TB hard drives using its second-generation Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to some of its data center customers. It is a significant milestone in its goal to ship 100TB HAMR drives by 2025. The company says it’s shipped qualification samples of the drives to some of its cloud partners as part of its Corvault storage systems, which it describes as a “self-healing block storage system that delivers multi-petabyte capacity.”

Though the drives offer record-breaking capacity, Seagate is cheeky about the details, including the number of internal platters, according to Tom’s Hardware. The company has been shipping HAMR drives to customers for testing for years, but it’s been a long road. To give you an idea of how long these drives have been in development, we initially wrote in 2004 that the first-gen HAMR drives would arrive in 2010. It finally announced a 16TB hard drive in 2018 and promises to deliver second-generation mainstream drives in Q3 of 2023, precisely what it said it would do last year. Seagate also notes on its blog it’s been able to achieve a 30% boost in aerial density with HAMR over the past nine years.

The main issue holding back large-scale production of these drives is they require entirely new internal components, including new media to accommodate the heating up/cooling down process and new read/write heads. This increases their costs significantly, making them only suitable for large-scale enterprise storage applications shortly. However, as Seagate can increase yields for the new components, prices will go down as time goes on. That will allow Seagate to transition its mainstream drives to this technology, but it likely won’t even begin that process until sometime in 2024.

Seagate seems to have the upper hand in storage capacity over its main rival Western Digital. WD announced it was beginning to ship 26TB hard drives last year using shingled magnetic recording (SMR), and those drives are available now. According to Anandtech, Seagate has announced it’s created 5TB platters, so, with 10 of those inside a 3.5″ drive, we’ll be at 50TB shortly. Whether or not the company will be able to hit 100TB by 2025 remains to be seen, but we’re here for it.