SEAGATE

Brand will launch a 30TB HDD with HAMR technology in the coming months

Hard drives are going to advance much further this year. Seagate company namely, when announcing financial results, said the second generation of HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology is expected to start mass production in the next quarter of this year. However, until then, more news should appear. There is talk of classic CMR/PMR recording hard drives with platter capacity increased to 2.2TB, which would mean hard drives with a capacity of up to 22TB. It should also target SMR technology, where a limited number of customers can get HDDs with a capacity of up to 24TB.

However, HAMR should eventually allow up to 5TB to be deployed on a single board. For now, it should start with a capacity of “only” 30 TB, already during the next quarter (sometime between April and June). This is really a significant increase in capacity over today's numbers (if I'm not mistaken, the maximum is 22TB for WD). Already between 2024 and 2025, HDD capacity with HAMR should increase to 40TB, and in 2026 we can expect even 50TB disks. Although mass-produced, it will continue to be a product with limited availability. It will mainly target the higher classes, limited by the ability to produce such a large number of hard drives (low throughput). Of course, this should improve over time, and over the next few years, HAMR technology should be seen in the middle and lower classes of HDDs as well.

We also learned a lot of other interesting information about the company's financial results. For example, hard drives continue to account for more than 88% of the company's revenue, while SSDs account for just under 12%. OEM partners have the biggest share of this, accounting for 72% of the company's revenue. Retail trade represents only 12%. In total, 112.5 EB of capacity has been distributed, and the average drive has a capacity of 7.3 TB.

by Milan Šurkala