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

At least one gigantic cloud provider has signed off on the drives' viability.

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.

Credit: Seagate

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.

There is no price yet, nor promise of delivery, but you can do some wishful thinking on the product page for the Exos M, where 30 and 32TB capacities are offered. That's 3TB per platter, and up to three times the efficiency per terabyte compared to "typical drives," according to Seagate. Seagate has previously boasted that its Mozaic 3+ HAMR drives, under "aggressive field use stress tests," have seen more than seven years of head life.

Western Digital has its own 32TB drive, based on energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording, or e-PMR. Both companies have suggested their high-capacity drives are ideal for AI model training, given the gargantuan storage demands and energy pull of that job. Toshiba intends to move into the HAMR drive space, which accounts for all three of the major HDD makers' plans.

As noted by Tom's Hardware, where we first saw the HAMR coming down, Seagate seems to confuse Exos M and Exos M 3+ when it comes time to promote its literally hot hard drive tech. Presumably, early adopters will know the difference when prices are revealed.

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