The HAMR technology can lead to HDDs of 20 TB by 2020

Oct 1, 2013 08:49 GMT  ·  By

Since capacity is the only advantage that hard disk drives have over solid-state drives, those who make a living off them need to always find ways to improve it, and Seagate is just about ready to demo a method that achieves that.

Said method is known as HAMR, which is the abbreviated form of the technology known as Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording.

Set to be incorporated into a 2.5-inch enterprise HDD, at least in the beginning, it enables platter speeds of 10K RPM (rotations per minute), yet still allows a colossal amount of data to be stored on a single platter.

In drives of 4-5 platters, total capacities could reach as high as 20 TB by 2020, if Seagate's technological curve proves as good as it hopes.

“The world is generating an astronomical amount of data annually and that data needs to be stored,” said Mark Re, Seagate's chief technology officer.

“We are approaching the limits of today's recording technology and with HAMR technology, Seagate is on track to continue to increase areal density delivering hard drives with the lowest cost per gigabyte and reaching capacities of 20TB by 2020.”

Seagate's HAMR demo is being held at Ceatec 2013 (October 1 through October 5, 2013), at the Makuhari Messe in Tokyo, at the TDK booth.

For those that want to know exactly how HAMR works, it increases capacity by heating the medium with a laser-generated beam right where data bits are being recorded.

Heat makes the medium (the platter) easier to write on, and the data is subsequently stabilized by the rapid cooling.

Initially, HAMR HDDs will be used in blade servers, and other enterprise, government or industrial applications where capacity is a must.

20 HAMR HDDs could, in theory, be used to store a digital library of all the books in the world (400 TB).