Seagate 30TB+ HDD ramp volume
LEADING mass-data storage solutions provider Seagate announced recently a milestone that marks a new era in the storage industry.
The company launched the Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform — which incorporates Seagate’s trailblazing implementation of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. The launch heralds unparalleled areal densities of 3TB+ per platter — and a roadmap that would achieve 4TB+ and 5TB+ per platter in the coming years.
The Mozaic 3+ platform powers Seagate’s flagship Exos product family, with newly announced industry-leading capacity points of 30TB and beyond. Exos 30TB+ products are shipping in volume this quarter to hyperscale cloud customers.
Seagate’s areal density innovation — which increases the number of bits that could be stored on a platter — addresses common industry pain points.
Mozaic 3+ enables customers to store more data in the same floor space than ever before. Upgrading from a 16TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drive (the average capacity in large-scale data centers) to an Exos 30TB Mozaic 3+ technology drive effectively doubles capacity in the same footprint.
The platform uses roughly the same material components as PMR hard drives while dramatically increasing capacity, allowing data centers to significantly lower storage acquisition and operational costs — including a 40 percent improvement in per terabyte power consumption.
Mozaic 3+ could also help customers achieve sustainability goals — a top priority for large-scale data centers — by offering a 55 percent reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte (when comparing a 30TB Mozaic 3+ drive with a traditional 16TB PMR drive).
Seagate is experiencing strong demand from data center customers who are expected to complete qualification of Mozaic 3+ and move into the volume ramp by end of this quarter. A leading cloud service provider is focused on ramping of Seagateprovided
drives to Mozaic 3+, reflecting 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 chief executive. “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.”
In addition to data centers, Mozaic 3+ storage technology would enable a wide range of use cases, ranging from enterprise to edge, NAS, and video and imaging applications (VIA) markets.