Seagate already sells 20 TB HAMR drives and promises to double their performance

Seagate has announced that they have already begun commercial shipments of their hard drives with Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology and that the first drives with 20 TB capacity are now reaching their distributors. In addition, they have said that they have extended the evaluation program for their dual-actuator Mach.2 hard drives with which they promise to double the performance of mechanical hard drives. The company is confident that its technology portfolio will allow them to increase capacity even further and continue to improve the performance of its hard drives for years to come.

Increasing the capacity of your hard drives is important, but as capacity, areal density, and read and write speeds increase, the random read and write IOPS performance per TB decreases, which affects the overall performance of the hard drives. . To alleviate this, the Seagate is developing dual-actuator Mach.2 technology with two independent actuators on a single pivot, effectively placing two drives within the same usual 3.5-inch size.

Seagate Mach.2, the technology that doubles the performance of hard drives

Seagate was the first manufacturer to introduce its Multi Actuator Technology (MAT) in late 2017 and then began testing such drives under the Exos 2X14 Mach.2 brand with select customers in 2019. At this point, the interest in hard drives Dual Actuator has grown significantly, so Seagate has decided to expand its evaluation program and increase shipments to bring this technology to market as soon as possible.

“Seagate's dual actuator technology, the first on the market, is gaining interest from a broader customer base that requires higher-performance mass storage for certain applications. We are increasing shipments of these dual actuator discs and expect higher volumes as to the capacities of these actuators increase. - said Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate.

The race for performance has been won by the SSD industry by far, so the biggest asset mechanical hard drives have to continue to exist is their massive capacity, but when you have a 20 TB hard drive you need to be able to access the entire information quickly, so obviously manufacturers also had to keep improving their performance in some way; It seems that Seagate has hit the nail on the head because with this dual actuator technology they have effectively doubled their performance, which is no small saying.

High-capacity HARM, the salvation of hard drives?

The demand for high-capacity hard drives is increasing significantly in recent times, so it is essential for hard drive manufacturers to be able to offer increasingly high capacities and with high energy efficiency. Last summer Seagate began selling 9-platter, 18TB-capacity hard drives, built on the same platform as the new 20TB HARM drives that are about to hit stores.

At this point, HAMR hard drives are already available to some of Seagate's customers, and while they are not yet available for the commercial user market, the company has already said they will be soon. Meanwhile, Seagate has said that it does not expect a large adoption of this new 20 TB drives having the 18 TB ones, but they do expect HAMR to increase the capacities of the hard drives by 20%, which implies 24 TB drives in a foreseeable future and that would already be a considerable increase in capacity.

In other words, Seagate is working on increasing both the capacity and the performance of their hard drives and while they are already marketing drives up to 20 TB, they expect HAMR technology to open the door for 24 TB drives in the near future. - something that will be further improved with twice the performance thanks to Mach.2 dual-actuator technology.

Will these two technologies be the salvation of the mechanical hard drive industry?