It’s been more than two decades since Seagate began working on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) — and now the company may finally be ready to release a hard drive using the technology. A new product page spotted by Tom’s Hardware shows an Exos M hard drive sporting up to 32TB of storage using Seagate’s Mozaic 3 Plus HAMR platform.
Seagate’s Mozaic 3 Plus technology allows for bigger hard drive capacities by making data bits smaller and closer together on each disk. To write data, a laser diode attached to the drive’s recording heads heats small areas of the disk. “Each bit is heated and cools down in a nanosecond, so the HAMR laser has no impact at all on drive temperature, or on the temperature, stability, or reliability of the media overall,” Seagate writes on its website.
Seagate says its Exos M hard drive has a 3TB per platter density, making it useful for enterprise applications like powering AI systems. We still don’t know when Seagate could release its Exos M hard drive, as its product page currently shows a link to “Stay Informed,” but a launch seems imminent.
As pointed out by Tom’s Guide, Seagate said in a filing earlier this month that it had “successfully completed qualification testing” for its HAMR hard drives with “several customers within the Mass Capacity markets, including a leading cloud service provider.” It says it will start shipping its HAMR-based hard drive to the unnamed cloud provider in the “coming weeks.”
The Verge reached out to Seagate with a request for more information but didn’t immediately hear back.
Seagate isn’t the only company working on high-capacity hard drives. In October, Western Digital launched a 32TB hard drive using energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), while Toshiba recently demonstrated high-capacity hard drives with HAMR and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR).