During CEATEC 2013 at Makuhari Messe in Tokyo, Japan, storage solution vendor Seagate will demonstrate its Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, which will probably be available in the market next year. The event has started today and will last till Saturday.
Pushing the boundaries of magnetic recording, Seagate’s revolutionary HAMR technology is poised to power an astounding 20 Terabyte drive by as early as 2020. It’s expected that Seagate will ship its first HAMR disks in 2014.
HMR vs. SMR disk drives
Seagate is currently shipping Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disk drives. HAMR technology will increase storage capacity by heating the medium with a laser-generated beam at the precise spot where data bits are being recorded. When heated, the medium becomes easier to write and the rapid subsequent cooling stabilizes the written data. The result of this heat-assisted recording is a dramatic increase in the recorded density.
HAMR, combined with self-ordered magnetic arrays of iron-platinum particles, is expected to break the limit of magnetic recording by more than a factor of 100 to ultimately deliver storage densities as great as 50 terabits per square inch. To put this in perspective, a digital library of all books written in the world would be approximately 400 TB – meaning that in the very near future conceivably all such books could be stored on as few as 20 HAMR disk drives.
Seagate’s next-generation HAMR technology will be incorporated into a 2.5-inch enterprise drive, spinning at 10K RPM. Designed with enterprise in mind, HAMR fueled drives will be ideal in a blade server environment.
During CEATEC 2013, Seagate HAMR demonstrations will take place on Tuesday, October 1st through Saturday, October 5th, 2013, at the TDK booth (Hall-1-3) during normal operating trade show hours.
