ST1901

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: HDD FOCUS:
HAMR: UNLOCKING THE NEXT STAGE OF
DATA GROWTH
JASON FEIST, MANAGING TECHNOLOGIST AT SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY, DESCRIBES HOW A LASER
NO BIGGER THAN A GRAIN OF SALT IS JUST ONE CRUCIAL ELEMENT OF THE NEXT GENERATION
OF HARD DRIVE TECHNOLOGIES
One thing is for sure: the
conventional way we store data
is reaching its limit. For the past
few decades we've grown accustomed to
hard drive capacity increasing as surely as
the passing of the seasons. But this will
soon change.
The world is producing more and more
data. With the development of
technologies like machine learning, 5G
and AI this statement might not come as a
surprise, but the sheer scale of the
challenge ahead is worth remembering. By
2025 the 'global datasphere' is expected to
reach an astounding 175ZB, according to
research from IDC sponsored by Seagate.
Nearly half (49%) of that data will reside in
the public cloud, further highlighting the
urgent need for new technology to help
deal with this massive increase in the
production and storage of data at scale.
Seagate is a company with a 40-year
heritage in data storage and management.
We understand these global industry
trends, which is why we have invested our
considerable research & development
resources behind a technology called heatassisted
magnetic recording, or HAMR for
short. With HAMR, hard drive capacities of
20TB and more will become commercially
available from 2020, and the technology
has the potential to make capacities of
100TB or more a possibility within a few
decades. The first HAMR drives are already
out with Seagate customers for final testing
and have been receiving excellent
feedback. Here's the story of why we need
a rethink of how we store data, and how
we're charting a way forward with HAMR
technology.
A PROBLEM OF GRAINS
While easily integrated and totally
transparent to the end-user, HAMR is a
highly complex technology sorely needed
in the data storage industry in order to
maximise capacity offerings. In order to
appreciate why HAMR is so important, we
first need to understand the current state
of data storage technology and why we
need innovative technologies in order to
be sustainable. The vast majority of hard
drives in the world today use technology
called conventional magnetic recording
(CMR). These hard drives are made up of
disk-shaped platters, covered in a thin
film of recording medium. This recording
medium is made up of tightly-packed
grains, which are polarized by magnetic
fields produced by a write head in such a
way that they can later be read as either
'0' or '1'.
Around a dozen of these grains make up
a single bit of data, and the key to
boosting the capacity of our hard drives
has been developing new ways to make the
grains smaller and pack as many as
possible in a given space. This strategy has
served the industry well for a number of
years, but we're reaching the end of its
usefulness. At a certain point, the grains on
a storage medium are so small that they
become unstable, potentially flipping
between 0 and 1 when they're not
supposed to. This can lead to data
30 STORAGE
Jan/Feb 2019
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MAGAZINE