Seagate 30TB+ Hard Drives Achieve Significant Volume

Seagate Technology Holdings plc announced a milestone that marks a new era in the storage industry.

The Mozaic 3 hard drive platform has been unveiled by the company, featuring Seagate's pioneering implementation of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. This launch introduces unprecedented areal densities, reaching 3TB+ per platter, with a roadmap set to achieve 4TB+ and 5TB+ per platter in the coming years.

The Seagate flagship Exos product family is now powered by the Mozaic 3+ platform, featuring industry-leading capacity points of 30TB and beyond. The Exos 30TB+ products are currently in volume shipment this quarter to meet the demands of hyperscale cloud customers.

Seagate's breakthrough in areal density innovation, expanding the storage capacity per platter, effectively tackles prevalent challenges in the industry. With Mozaic 3+, customers can now store significantly more data within the same physical space. Transitioning from a 16TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drive, which is the average capacity in large-scale data centers, to an Exos 30TB drive with Mozaic 3+ technology doubles the capacity within the identical footprint.

Utilizing similar material components as PMR hard drives, the platform substantially enhances capacity, enabling data centers to notably reduce both storage acquisition and operational costs. This includes a notable 40% improvement in per-terabyte power consumption. Mozaic 3+ not only contributes to cost efficiency but also aligns with sustainability objectives, a key focus for large-scale data centers. In comparison to a traditional 16TB PMR drive, a 30TB Mozaic 3+ drive offers a significant 55% reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte.

Seagate is witnessing robust demand from data center customers, with the anticipation of completing the qualification of Mozaic 3+ and transitioning into volume ramp-up by the end of this quarter. A prominent cloud service provider is actively increasing the adoption of Seagate-provided drives with Mozaic 3+, underscoring their confidence in the technology.

“Seagate is the world’s only hard drive manufacturer with the areal density capability to get to 3TB per platter and with 5TB on the horizon,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate’s CEO. “As AI use cases put a premium on raw data sets, more companies are going to need to store all the data they can. To accommodate the resulting masses of data, areal density matters more than ever.”

“The Mozaic 3+ platform represents more than just HAMR technology,” Mosley noted. “It comprises several industry-first innovations that we’ve integrated to help us scale areal density.”

Here are a few highlights:

1. Superlattice Platinum-Alloy Media. 

Achieving higher-density recording in storage involves smaller media grain sizes at the nanoscale due to fundamental physics. However, a challenge arises as smaller grains tend to be more unstable. Legacy alloys fall short of providing the necessary magnetic stability for effective and reliable storage. In Mozaic 3+ hard drives, the media alloy adopts a groundbreaking iron-platinum superlattice structure. This innovation substantially enhances the magnetic coercivity of disk media, enabling precise data writing and ensuring unprecedented bit stability.

2. Plasmonic Writer. 

To counteract instability, the media is magnetically hardened in the design, necessitating a revolutionary writer. Seagate's unique implementation of HAMR, a marvel of miniaturization and precision engineering, is at the core of this design. Anchoring this technology is a nanophotonic laser, creating an infinitesimal heat spot on the media surface to ensure reliable data writing.

Seagate plans to vertically integrate the nanophotonic laser into the plasmonic writer sub-system. “Developing this unique laser technology in-house for Mozaic 3+ will ensure even greater efficiency and yield to support rapid scaling of volume production,” Mosley said.

3. Gen 7 Spintronic Reader. 

The usefulness of smaller data grains is contingent on their readability. In conjunction with the sub-components of the plasmonic writer, the reader had to undergo advancements as well. Mozaic 3+ incorporates quantum technology, featuring one of the world's smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors.

4. 12nm Integrated Controller. 

Effectively managing all this technology necessitated an integrated controller—a system-on-a-chip—developed entirely in-house. This advanced application-specific integrated circuit boasts up to 3 times the performance compared to previous solutions.

“Hard drive areal density improvements are critical for economically and efficiently expanding the installed base of hard drive-based mass storage, especially in data centers,” said John Rydning, Research Vice President IDC Global DataSphere. “Seagate’s innovative areal density breakthrough is timely and will enable it to deliver increasingly higher capacity hard drive products for many years.”

Beyond data centers, Mozaic 3+ storage technology will empower diverse use cases, spanning from enterprise and edge to NAS, as well as video and imaging applications (VIA) markets.