Seagate this week unveiled the industry’s first hard disk drive platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR). Tom’s Hardware:

The new Mozaic 3+ platform relies on several all-new technologies, including new media, new write and read heads, and a brand-new controller. The platform will be used for Seagate’s upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with a 30TB capacity and higher. Heat-assisted magnetic recording is meant to radically increase areal recording density of magnetic media by making writes while the recording region is briefly heated to a point where its magnetic coercivity drops significantly.

Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer consisting of an iron-platinum superlattice structure that ensures both longevity and smaller media grain size compared to typical HDD platters. To record the media, the platform uses a plasmonic writer sub-system with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser that heats the media before writing. Because individual grains are so small with the new media, their individual magnetic signatures are lower, whereas magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) effect is somewhat higher. As a result, Seagate had to introduce its new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the “world’s smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors,” according to the company. Because Seagate’s new Mozaic 3+ platform deals with new media with a very small grain size, an all-new writer, and a reader that features multiple tiny magnetic field readers, it also requires a lot of compute horsepower to orchestrate the drive’s work. Therefore, Seagate has equipped with Mozaic 3+ platform with an all-new controller made on a 12nm fabrication process.

Abstract credit: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/01/19/1149214/30tb-hard-drives-are-nearly-here

  • It is astounding how many comments on that article don’t know about 3-2-1, which is industry standard. Yet they feel qualified enough to say that this is “putting all your eggs in one basket” and make it sound like this is a bad idea.

    I mean, do they not realize that was the exact same problem 10 years ago with 10TB HDD’s? And that we’ve had a protocol for literally decades to address it? Have they not heard of backups? Are they under the impression they’re only allowed to buy one?

    I swear it’s not enough for everyone to have an opinion on everything. It’s not even enough for them to vocalize it. They have to sound smug and act like these companies are completely foolish for even making these. I don’t even understand how arrogant you have to be to operate like that on a regular basis.

    Sincerely, some with several 18-20TB HDD’s drooling for this.