After decades of talk, Seagate seems ready to actually drop the HAMR hard drives

How do you fit 32 terabytes of storage into a hard drive? With a HAMR.

Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, since at least 2002. The firm has occasionally popped up to offer a demonstration or make yet another “around the corner” pronouncement. The press has enjoyed myriad chances to celebrate the wordplay of Stanley Kirk Burrell, but new qualification from large-scale customers might mean HAMR drives will be actually available, to buy, as physical objects, for anyone who can afford the most magnetic space possible. Third decade’s the charm, perhaps.

HAMR works on the principle that, when heated, a disk’s magnetic materials can hold more data in smaller spaces, such that you can fit more overall data on the drive. It’s not just putting a tiny hot plate inside an HDD chassis; as Seagate explains in its technical paper, “the entire process—heating, writing, and cooling—takes less than 1 nanosecond.” Getting from a physics concept to an actual drive involved adding a laser diode to the drive head, optical steering, firmware alterations, and “a million other little things that engineers spent countless hours developing.” Seagate has a lot more about Mozaic 3+ on its site.

Seagate’s rendering of how its unique heating laser head allows for 3TB per magnetic platter in Mozaic drives.

Drives based on Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ platform, in standard drive sizes, will soon arrive with wider availability than its initial test batches. The driver maker put in a financial filing earlier this month (PDF) that it had completed qualification testing with several large-volume customers, including “a leading cloud service provider,” akin to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or the like. Volume shipments are likely soon to follow.