Did you also think that our good old hard drives were a thing of the past and that now only flash memories counted? Well, think again because the high-capacity storage market has not said its last word. The proof with Seagate which has just unveiled its first ever hard drive based on the technology HAMMER (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording), after more than 15 years of development. We no longer believed it!
The HAMMERit’s like having a traditional hard drive but with superpowers. Let me explain… Instead of writing data normally, this technique uses a tiny plasmonic burner to heat the disk surface to more than 425°C during writing and then cools down in less than two nanoseconds. This way we can stuff even more onto the trays.
This technical feat is made possible thanks to a specially designed platinum alloy support, equipped with magnetic coercivity (basically, the robustness of magnetic data in the face of ambient disturbances) superior to traditional discs. The technology also uses a 7th generation spintronic reader capable of reading data accurately at very high areal densities.
Classical readers take advantage of only one characteristic of electrons: their electrical charge. On the other hand, spintronic technology goes further by using 2 properties of electrons: not only their electric charge, but also their spin. Spin can be thought of as a mini-compass built into each electron, which can point in two opposite directions (up or down). This property, which relates to quantum physics, gives the electron a particular magnetic behavior. So cool, right?
In short, this new model called Exos M thus establishes a new standard with its 32 To capacity (also available in 30 TB version). Its storage density reaches 3 TB per platteralmost double the current traditional disks. Note that the 32TB version uses SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording), while the 30TB relies on CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording), which provides a little more flexibility as needed.
And its benefits don’t stop at capacity. Seagate announces energy efficiency three times higher per terabyte compared to traditional disks. The drive also incorporates a specially designed 12nm controller to ensure data integrity and remains compatible with existing systems, making adoption much easier.
This technology mainly targets data centers and businesses managing large volumes of data. Perfect for storing high-definition video archives, enterprise data backup, hosting cloud services, big data analysis for AI or even scalable storage for cloud service providers.
And contrary to some predictions, this new type of hard drives remains relevant, particularly in mass storage where the cost/capacity ratio remains decisive. So 90TB of storage on hard drives costs around $1,600, compared to $9,900 on SSDs. Western Digital also recently released 32TB drives on competing technologies, but Seagate, with its HAMR platform, appears to have gotten a head start in the race for density and cost efficiency.
This HAMR technology really represents a major advance in meeting the explosion of storage needs and the cool thing is that it is compatible with existing systems, since it relies more than 90% on proven components from previous generations. Reliability and ease of adoption are great!
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