- Regardless of predictions, HDDs are right here to remain and growing in capability
- Seagate not too long ago bought one exabyte of HAMR storage to 2 hyperscalers
- The “tens of hundreds of drives” seemingly price between $33 and $35 million
Though the likes of Pure Storage, IBM, and Meta imagine the writing is on the wall for onerous drives, the expertise doesn’t appear like it is going to be going away any time quickly.
Seagate and its important rival Western Digital are engaged on magnetic recording strategies that can permit the drives to proceed growing in capability, serving to them keep a transparent benefit over SSDs in relation to storage density.
The principle expertise main this cost is HAMR, or heat-assisted magnetic recording, which may see HDDs hitting unimaginable 100TB capacities. HAMR works by briefly heating the disk floor with a laser to make it simpler to write down information at greater densities. HDMR – brief for heated dot magnetic recording – is HAMR’s seemingly successor and will result in even bigger drives by focusing the warmth and magnetic vitality into smaller, extra exact areas for even denser information storage.
Not an unreasonable outlay
In a latest The Wall Avenue Journal article, John Keilman wrote an article overlaying Seagate’s “struggle to retailer the world’s information”, and talked about one thing which caught my consideration. “Seagate mentioned two massive cloud-computing prospects have every ordered one exabyte’s value of HAMR storage, which works out to tens of hundreds of onerous drives.”
Keilman didn’t title names – Seagate wouldn’t have advised him who the consumers had been – however we will slim the listing of suspects all the way down to the same old huge US hyperscalers, together with Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta. It’s attainable that Chinese language hyperscalers may have come looking for the drives, however that appears unlikely to me.
Keilman doesn’t say what capability drives had been bought, however we will assume they are going to have been Seagate’s highest business HDD, the Exos M, which ranges from 30TB (CMR) to 36TB (SMR), with a breakthrough 3TB-per-platter density. Primarily based on timing, it’s seemingly we’re speaking in regards to the 30TB fashions, because the 32TB drive was solely added to the vary in December 2024, adopted by the 36TB mannequin only a month later.
Assuming the hyperscalers in query paid bulk pricing of round $500 per drive (refurbished fashions of Seagate’s Exos 28TB HDD can presently be bought for as little as $365), their mixed invoice seemingly got here to someplace between $33 and $35 million. For a full exabyte of cutting-edge, high-capacity storage, $16 billion or so is not an unreasonable outlay.
Seagate beforehand revealed {that a} 60TB drive was on its method, and the agency not too long ago introduced plans to purchase Intevac, a HAMR specialist, which may assist it obtain that 100TB capability aim quicker, in addition to ramp up HAMR drive manufacturing.