Seagate Launches HAMR Hard Drives After Over 20 Years of R&D: 32TB Drives Begin Mass Shipment

After more than two decades of research and testing, storage device manufacturer Seagate has officially announced the launch of its high-capacity mechanical hard drives based on Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. The company's initial products in this line are the 30TB and 32TB Seagate Exos M drives.

Seagate began its exploration of HAMR technology back in 2002, during which it tested countless solutions and published numerous technical papers. A few years ago, Seagate started testing hard drives built on HAMR technology.

The principle behind HAMR technology is that magnetic materials can store more data in smaller spaces when heated, allowing disks to hold more information and, consequently, the overall drive to offer greater capacity.

Seagate engineers have clarified in their papers that incorporating a mini heating module into the hard drive involves much more than it might seem. The entire process of heating, writing, and cooling takes less than 1 nanosecond (ns). Transforming the physical concept into an actual hard drive entailed adding laser diodes to the disk heads, optical steering, firmware modifications, and millions of other tiny elements developed by engineers over countless hours.

So, why is Seagate only now officially launching its HAMR hard drives? After several years of testing, Seagate believes the technology is stable enough for a broad release to most of its data center customers.

In fact, among those already prepared to place orders are several large cloud computing firms, indicating the technology's maturity and readiness for deployment in data centers.

As for when HAMR technology hard drives will become available to consumers, it's still hard to say. Even by optimistic estimates, it might be a few more years before Seagate launches consumer-grade, high-capacity HAMR drives.