30TB Hard Drives Are on the Way – Seagate Will Provide the Next Jump in HDD Capacities With Their Mozaic 3+ HAMR Platform
On Wednesday, Seagate introduced the first hard disk drive platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR).
The new platform, Mozaic 3+, relies on many new technologies, including new media, new write and read heads and a new controller. The platform will be used in Seagate’s upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with 30TB of capacity and possibly higher capacities to come.
Heat-assisted magnetic recording is designed to increase the recording density of magnetic media by writing data while the recording area is heated. Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer consisting of iron and platinum which provides longevity and a smaller media grain size (the individual places data is written to).
To record data to the new media, the platform uses a laser to heat the media before writing data. For reading the media, Seagate has implemented its new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the “world’s smallest and mouse sensitive magnetic field reading sensors,” according to Seagate.
All this new technology requires substantial compute horsepower to orchestrate the drives work. Seagate has equipped the platform with an all-new controller made on a 12nm process. The new controller is 3 times more powerful than its predecessors, according to Seagate. The company has not yet disclosed the number and type of processing cores it uses for the new controller.
In addition to the new drive’s higher capacity, they also have higher read and write speeds, and reduced power consumption per TB. However, the new drives have a lower IOPS per TB performance, which would need to somehow be mitigated by could server providers. The new drives are implied by Seagate to be drop-in replacements for existing hardware.