Need to nail some storage? Seagate is bringing the HAMR!

NEWS – Gadgeteers keep a lot of stuff, and much of that is digital stuff.  Photos, videos, miscellaneous files – they all take up storage space.  For business, it’s even worse as all employees have that “can’t get rid of it” mentality. Seagate is bringing the HAMR down with their brand new Exos 20+ series hard drives with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.

HAMR tech briefly heats the disk material, making it  more receptive to the magnetic recording heads inside the disk assembly.  This allows the data bits to be smaller so they can pack more data into the same physical space. Who cares, you say?  Well, this new recording method is allowing Seagate to produce brand new drives later this year, starting at 20TB as drop-in replacement 3.5″ drive bays.

Think about that for a minute.  In one of my early jobs back in 1985, I was the first person in the office to get an IBM AT PC.  Everyone else had XTs with 10MB hard drives.  The AT has a 20MB hard drive.  20MB!  20-million bytes of storage!  Who could possibly fill all that space?  Now, Seagate’s new Exos 20+ can hold the same amount of data as ONE MILLION of those AT hard drives!  That’s a pretty amazing difference in 35 years.  Granted, these are enterprise-class disks versus personal-class disks, but they’re still the same physical form factor.

Seagate expects to ship 18TB and 20TB drives later this year and has a roadmap to deliver 80TB drives.  They should have read and write speeds in excess of 261MB per second and spin at 7200RPM.

Seagate hasn’t announced an official ship date nor pricing, but I’m sure they won’t come cheap.  Still, if you run a data center and need a ton of storage, this looks like a viable solution.

You can read more about Seagate’s HAMR technology on Seagate’s website.

Filed in categories: News

Tagged: Hard Drive

Need to nail some storage? Seagate is bringing the HAMR! originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 29, 2020 at 8:00 am.

Note: If you are subscribed to this feed through FeedBurner, please switch to our native feed URL http://the-gadgeteer.com/feed/ in order to ensure continuous delivery.