Seagate Technology has began delivery its exhausting disk drives that includes a 18TB capability to pick out clients, and revealed that HDDs can be extra broadly out there later this year. However whereas 18TB drives considerably enhance storage capacities of recent datacenters, Seagate has a extra necessary launch set for the subsequent few months, because it additionally intends to start out industrial shipments of its drives primarily based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).
The significance of HAMR — a know-how that has been explored for 66 years now — is key as it’s anticipated to allow exhausting with capacities of as much as 80 TB within the coming years.
“We started delivery 18TB drives as a part of our system resolution within the March quarter, with shipments to pick out cloud clients and channel companions beginning within the June quarter,” mentioned Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate. “We anticipate to start ramping 18-terabyte drives inside the calendar year, which aligns properly with market readiness.”
HAMR incoming
As anticipated, Seagate’s first HAMR-based HDDs will characteristic a 20TB capability utilizing heat-assisted standard magnetic recording with none ‘shingling’ and subsequently these drives will supply predictable write efficiency.
“We stay on monitor to start delivery our first commercially out there HAMR drives in late 2020 on 20TB capacities. HAMR know-how would be the business’s path to reaching drive capacities of 30, 40, 50 terabytes and even increased. We plan to supply 20TB HAMR drives to clients on a restricted foundation and is a part of our system resolution to gather manufacturing and area knowledge.”
It’s noteworthy that Seagate has been delivery 16TB HAMR drives to pick out clients for some time and to that finish it already has fairly some data how these HDDs behave in tightly-packed datacenters. Because it seems, the corporate desires to assemble some extra knowledge about efficiency of the know-how.