Magnetics Business & Technology - May/June 2019 - 30

VISIONS

Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording Milestone Reached by Seagate Technology

Note from the Editor: It is widely accepted that Increasing the density
of data storage is crucial to the future of inexpensive digital technology. Since magnetic hard-disk drives are the dominant storage medium
for the "Cloud", for years the continued evolution of this $30 billion
industry has been seen to depend on the commercial development of
heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). This technology uses heat
from a laser beam confined well below the diffraction limit to write to
media near 450°C with high magnetic anisotropy that would normally
be unwritable under available magnetic fields. Under the hood, hard
drive media rely on ultra-thin coatings of iron oxide, a ferromagnetic
material which can be permanently magnetized when exposed to a
magnetic field. Each drive head has a tiny electromagnet consisting of
an iron core wrapped in wire. Ironically, high temperature is typically
the enemy of magnetics performance but, in this case, it is the enabler.
Achieving another major milestone toward volume shipments of its
pioneering HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology,
Seagate announced it has used its advanced HAMR technology
to build and test the world's first formatted and fully functioning
16TB enterprise hard drive platform in a standard 3.5-inch form
factor - the highest capacity hard drives ever produced. Seagate
is on track to grow beyond 20TB per drive in calendar 2020.
Seagate is using this 16 terabyte pre-release version of its HAMRbased Exos hard drive to run the tests customers commonly use
when integrating hard drives into enterprise applications. The successful tests have confirmed the HAMR drives are plug-and-play
and operate just as any other hard drive in standard enterprise
application environments, the company said. No architectural
changes are needed to integrate HAMR drives into current data
centers and systems. Customers simply plug the drives in as with
any other enterprise hard drive.
In today's dawning Data Age, the hunger for greater storage capacity continues to accelerate, as data capture and creation at the
edge proliferates, and rapidly-evolving Artificial Intelligence applications demand access to ever-larger datasets to extract crucial

Magnetics Business & Technology * May/June 2019

learnings. Affordable, deployable storage capacity enables the
digitization of the world. Seagate has developed HAMR to enable
the next big increase in the amount of data that can be stored on
a hard drive.
HAMR uses a new kind of media magnetic technology on each
disk that allows data bits, or grains, to become smaller and more
densely packed than ever, while remaining magnetically stable.
A small laser diode attached to each recording head heats a tiny
spot on the disk, which enables the recording head to flip the magnetic polarity of each very stable bit, enabling data to be written.
Seagate's proprietary execution of HAMR technology will be delivered in the industry's standard form
factor, thus reducing total cost of ownership by getting a lot more terabytes into the same space as a
conventional hard drive.
"Seagate has begun running early Exos HAMR units
through the full set of standard benchmark tests used
to prepare and optimize each new hard drive product for deployment," says Jason Feist, Seagate's Jason Feist,
senior director of enterprise product line manage- senior director of
ment. "Our testing has demonstrated the drives' enterprise product
compatibility for enterprise systems that are being line management at
used today. No system level changes are needed Seagate
to run the HAMR drives in these evaluations, or to
deploy them in customer environments."
"The Exos HAMR drives run like all other drives in a standard suite
of integration benchmarks. At this point in early testing, they're
meeting our expectations for how a drive should interact in each
benchmark," Feist explains. "These are the same tests that customers use to qualify every new drive, including power efficiency,
utilities that test commands to devices and others," said Feist.

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