- Despite the predictions, HDDs are here to stay and increase the capacity
- Seagate recently sold a Hamr storage exabyte to two hyperscalers
- “Tens of thousands of units” probably cost between $ 33 and $ 35 million
Although the tastes of Pure Storage, IBM and goal believe that writing is on the wall for hard drives, technology does not seem to disappear soon.
Seagate and its main rival Western Digital are working on magnetic recording methods that will allow units to continue increasing capacity, helping them maintain a clear advantage over the SSDs when it comes to storage density.
The main technology that leads this load is HAMR, or a heat -assisted magnetic recording, which could see HDD that reach incredible capabilities of 100 TB. HAMR works briefly by heating the surface of the disc with a laser to facilitate the writing of data to higher densities. HDMR, abbreviation for the magnetic recording of heated points, is the probable successor of HAMR and could lead to even larger units by focusing the heat and magnetic energy in smaller and more precise areas for the storage of even denser data.
It is not an unreasonable disbursement
In a recent one The Wall Street Journal Article, John Keilman, wrote an article that covers the “struggle to store the data of the world” of Seagate, and mentioned something that caught my attention. “Seagate said that two big clients who compete in the cloud have ordered HAMR storage worth a exabyte, resulting in tens of thousands of hard drives.”
Keilman did not appoint the names, Seagate would not have told him who buyers were, but we can reduce the list of suspects to the usual hyperscalers of the United States, including Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta. It is possible that Chinese hyperscalers have come to buy the units, but that seems unlikely.
Keilman does not say what units of capacity were sold, but we can assume that they will have been the highest commercial HDD of Seagate, the M exos, which varies from 30 TB (CMR) to 36TB (SMR), with a 3TB density for 30TB embedding. According to the time, we are likely to be talking about 30TB models, since the 32TB unit was only added to the range in December 2024, followed by model 36TB only one month later.
Assuming that hyperscalers in question pay mass prices of around $ 500 per trip (restored HDD models 28TB of Seagate can currently be purchased for only $ 365), their combined invoice probably reached between $ 33 and $ 35 million. For a complete exabyte of avant -garde storage, high capacity, $ 16 billion is not an unreasonable disbursement.
Seagate previously revealed that a 60 -TB unit was on their way, and the firm recently announced plans to acquire intevac, a HAMR specialist, who could help him achieve that faster 100 TB capacity goal, as well as increase Hamr Drive production.
