Milestone: Seagate Achieves 16TB Capacity on Internal HAMR 3.5-Inches HDD Test Units

Achieving another milestone toward volume shipments of its HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, Seagate Technology LLC used its this technology to build and test the world’s first formatted and functioning 16TB enterprise hard drive platform in a standard 3.5-inch form factor – the highest capacity HDDs ever produced.

The company is on track to grow beyond 20TB per drive in calendar 2020.

The company is using this 16TB pre-release version of its HAMR-based Exos hard drive to run the tests customers commonly use when integrating hard drives into enterprise applications. The tests have confirmed the HAMR drives are plug-and-play and operate just as any other HDD in standard enterprise application environments. No architectural changes are needed to integrate HAMR drives into current data centers and systems. Customers simply plug the drives in as with any other enterprise HDD.

In today’s dawning ‘Data Age’, the hunger for greater storage capacity continues to accelerate, as data capture and creation at the edge proliferates, and rapidly-evolving AI applications demand access to ever-larger datasets to extract crucial learnings. Affordable, deployable storage capacity enables the digitization of the world.

The company has developed HAMR to enable the next big increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a HDD. It uses a new kind of media magnetic technology on each disk that allows data bits, or grains, to become smaller and more densely packed than ever, while remaining magnetically stable. A small laser diode attached to each recording head heats a tiny spot on the disk, which enables the recording head to flip the magnetic polarity of each very stable bit, enabling data to be written. The firm’s proprietary execution of HAMR technology will be delivered in the industry’s standard form factor, thus reducing TCO by getting a lot more terabytes into the same space as a conventional hard drive.

HAMR drives are plug-and-play, operate like conventional drives in standard integration benchmark tests.

“Seagate has begun running early Exos HAMR units through the full set of standard benchmark tests used to prepare and optimize each new hard drive product for deployment,” says Jason Feist, senior director, enterprise product line management, Seagate. “Our testing has demonstrated the drives’ compatibility for enterprise systems that are being used today. No system level changes are needed to run the HAMR drives in these evaluations, or to deploy them in customer environments.”

“The Exos HAMR drives run like all other drives in a standard suite of integration benchmarks. At this point in early testing, they’re meeting our expectations for how a drive should interact in each benchmark,” he explains. “These are the same tests that customers use to qualify every new drive, including power efficiency tests, sg3_utils utilities that test SCSI commands to devices, standard smartmontools utility programs that will enable customers to characterize and compare HAMR drives in their environment right next to PMR drives, and several four-corners tests of reads, writes, random, sequential and mixed workloads.”

These product-level HAMR tests provide further weight to the results from last year’s in-lab reliability tests. In those tests the firm’s HAMR read/write heads far exceeded industry standards for reliability and lifetime data transfer capability, surpassing customer requirements and standard hard drive specifications by a factor of twenty. Combined with HAMR’s plug-and-play compatibility with standard systems, the results have further cemented customers’ confidence in HAMR’s readiness to launch into standard cloud and IT environments next year.

“The HAMR technology we demo’ed last year is now being fully integrated into Seagate’s industry-leading high-capacity enterprise product portfolio,” says Feist. “We continue on track to deliver the future generations of Seagate Exos hard drives equipped with HAMR to achieve industry-leading areal density and capacity.”

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