Seagate's financial reports have been indicating imminent mass production of HAMR HDDs for a few years now, and it looks like the wait for these drives to appear in retail is finally at an end. The Seagate Exos product family is getting a 30TB capacity point, thanks to the use of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. The company talked to the press last week about the Mozaic 3+ platform – their first high-volume HAMR platform – and how it sets the stage for rapid areal density scaling over the next few years.
Seagate's new Exos 30TB HDDs use platters with an areal density of 3TB per platter, and Seagate has plans to scale that up at a rate of up to 20% generation-over-generation in the next few years (compared to the 8% rate that CMR HDD capacities have been growing at in the last decade or so). The company indicated that volume shipments are happening this quarter to hyperscalers. Seagate is observing that the average customer upgrading from a 16TB conventional magnetic recording platform to the new 30TB+ HDDs can almost double the capacity of their server racks in the same footprint, as the new drives are drop-in replacements. This brings TCO benefits, particularly in terms of power consumption. The company is even quantifying that - the Exos X16's average power consumption of 9.44W translates to 0.59W / TB. The new Exos 30TB's equivalent number is a bit higher at 10.5W, but that translates to a 40% power savings on a per-TB basis at 0.35W / TB.
