Seagate has been speaking about its 2nd era exhausting disk drive platform that includes its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) know-how and capacities past 30TB for fairly some time however has by no means disclosed when precisely it plans to launch them. Nevertheless, this week the corporate lastly revealed that it intends to launch its 30TB+ HDDs in mid-2023, a yr from now.
“We’re properly down the event path in direction of launching our 30+ TB household of drives based mostly on HAMR know-how,” mentioned David Mosley, chief govt of Seagate, on the firm’s earnings name with traders and monetary analysts (through SeekingAlpha (opens in new tab)). “We count on to start buyer shipments of those HAMR-based merchandise by this time subsequent yr.”
Seagate’s 2nd era HAMR platform is a giant deal for the corporate as this know-how will allow it to extend the capability of its exhausting drives to 50TB and past. The corporate’s publicly obtainable roadmap vaguely places the supply of ’30+TB drives’ on calendar 2023. Nonetheless, a proper cargo on December 20, 2023, may also be thought of as a ‘2023 availability,’ which is why we think about this a part of Seagate’s plan with a sure diploma of skepticism. But, the top of Seagate introduced an precise availability timeframe for these elements.
Seagate has been transport exhausting drives powered by its 1st era HAMR platform to pick out prospects and inside its Lyve storage methods for fairly some time now, however these merchandise have by no means been obtainable to a broad viewers. Seagate mentioned its 2nd Gen HAMR HDDs can be broadly obtainable final yr.
There’s a small catch, although. Buyer shipments don’t imply mass availability of 30TB+ HDDs this time in 2023. As an alternative, the corporate could once more provide its HAMR drives to pick out purchasers amongst operators of hyperscale information facilities after which maintain the launch for all different sorts of prospects.
It isn’t going to be utterly surprising, although. HAMR requires Seagate to vary the entire HDD platform. It consists of the media, magnetic layer, writing and studying heads, actuators, controller, and quite a few different exhausting drive elements. Since these might be model new elements for Seagate, count on 30TB HAMR drives to be fairly exhausting to provide and costly.
One other side of 30TB+ HDDs with a single actuator is their IOPS-per-TB efficiency. As capability will increase, IOPS-per-TB efficiency drops, which impacts system responsiveness and, in the end, high quality of service. For giant hyperscalers, mitigating this impact isn’t an issue. Nonetheless, this concern could grow to be an issue for folks serving conventional company datacenters or working an enterprise-grade NAS, so they could choose to attend for dual-actuator HDDs of comparable capability.
Maintaining in thoughts the prices/costs and IOPS-per-TB efficiency of single-actuator 30TB+ HDDs, we can’t be shocked if these ultra-high-capacity HDDs might be obtainable initially to pick out prospects solely.
