Seagate Tests 5 Terabyte Disks, Paving the Way for 50TB Hard Drives

Seagate is lab testing the disks that will allow it to produce 50 terabyte hard drives.

As Tom’s Hardware reports(Opens in a new window), during the Bank of America 2023 Global Technology Conference, Seagate’s chief financial office Gianluca Romano laid out a loose roadmap for HAMR hard drive development. Seeking Alpha published a transcript of the chat(Opens in a new window) Romano had during the conference with Wamsi Mohan, senior equity research analyst at Bank of America.

Romano explained how the use of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology is growing faster than Seagate expected and the future looks bright for capacity increases. First, a 32TB drive is planned using 10 disks and 20 heads, which will then be followed by a 36TB drive and a 40TB drive. Romano also confirmed that “in our lab, we are already running individual disks at 5 terabytes.”

Once 5TB disks go into production, those same drives with 10 disks should be able to offer 50TB capacities. Romani also points out that these increases in areal densities do not increase the cost per unit because “it’s the same bill of material,” and that Seagate could, “maybe give some of that cost reduction to our customers.”

No clear timeline was given for the release of these larger drives, but the 32TB hard drive is expected before the end of the year(Opens in a new window). Back in 2020, Seagate said it expected to start selling 50TB HAMR hard drives in 2026, which still seems feasible. That’s certainly not the end of the capacity increases for this aging storage technology, though, with Japanese company Showa Denko K.K. claiming it can improve HAMR technology to make 80TB hard drives a reality.

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