Seagate's Next Generation Hard Drives to Utilize HAMR Technology

Seagate has announced a preview of its upcoming hard drive lineup that will use heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. The company's roadmap indicates that the first commercial release of 32 TB capacity HAMR Mach 2 drives is scheduled for Q3 2023, with increased storage (40 TB) models predicted for launch in 2024. Seagate is also expected to release 24 TB and 28 TB capacity HDDs based on the older perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology in the near future. These two product ranges are expected to co-exist until Seagate decides to favor its more advanced thermal magnetic storage solution.

Seagate has supplied a lucky data center client with evaluation HAMR hardware, and other enterprise customers with unspecified HAMR HDD models. Executives at Seagate have been discussing their HAMR products, which are destined to sit in new Corvault server equipment. Gianluca Romano, the company's chief financial officer, mentioned several models during a presentation at the Bank of America 2023 Global Technology conference.

Romano outlined the cost benefit of producing these hard disk drives, stating that Seagate can increase capacity without increasing the cost per unit because it's the same bill of material. This will give the industry and Seagate a cost reduction, which can be passed on to customers to improve their total cost of ownership (TCO). However, Seagate will keep a good part of that cost improvement to improve the gross margin.

Romano proposes that Seagate will ultimately profit from their new endeavor, alongside a small saving for clients. He suggests that the video and image application will be in the 20 terabytes and other legacy products will be lower. But Seagate can offer a 20-terabyte drive with 5 disks and 10 heads, which will compete with a traditional drive with 10 disks and 20 heads. This is a huge difference in bill of material and cost.