Seagate plans to release 100TB HDDs by 2025/2026 using HAMR technology

Seagate’s HDD roadmaps clearly show that the HDD is far from dead, promising to deliver a 48TB HDD in 2023, a leap of over 3.4x when compared to today’s 14TB HDDs from the company. 

Thanks to the addition of HAMR technology, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording, Seagate plans to double storage densities every 30 months (2.5 years), making a 100TB HDD possible in 2025/2026. This technology will increase the density of HDDs enough to make them more competitive within today’s data-centric storage market. 

Before 2020, Seagate plans to release 16TB 3.5-inch HDDs using traditional PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) techniques, while also releasing initial 16TB HAMR-based drives to a “Key Partner” in the interim. In 2020, Seagate plans to release their first 20+ TB HAMR-based HDDs, and hopes for drive capacities to skyrocket after the technology’s introduction. 

Western Digital, another major name in the HDD space, plans to back their Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording technology as an alternative to HAMR-based drives, claiming that their technology will increase HDD longevity while offering similar storage density benefits. 
  

  

Alongside their HAMR-based HDDs, Seagate also plans to launch drives with Multi-Actuator technology, allowing their future drives to offer increased performance levels (IOPS) by utilising several independent actuators, which will parallelise their future drives to deliver increased read/write performance. This technology should allow IOPS/TB metrics to remain the same as today’s drives, despite the increase capacities provided by HAMR. 

You can learn more about Seagate’ MACH.2 Multi-Actuator technology on here. 

  

The introduction of HAMR and its competing technologies will deliver an upheaval of the traditional HDD industry, allowing drive capacities to skyrocket while also allowing the cost/GB of mechanical drives to plummet in the years following its introduction. HDDs are about to get a lot bigger. 

You can join the discussion on Seagate’s HAMR technology delivering HDDs as large as 100TB by 2026 on the OC3D Forums.