Seagate still HAMRing away at the 100 TB disk drive decades later
The Register, Monday, June 9th, 2025
The journey to mass production has been extraordinarily difficult - will it be worth it?
Seagate says it has a clear way forward to 100 TB disk drives using 10 TB per platter technology, but HAMR tech is nearly 25 years old and full mass production is still not underway. What has been taking so long?
HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology is used to write data to a granular iron platinum medium that can support stable bit storage at more than 1 Tb/in squared area density - but only when the bit areas are heated using a laser. That's 3-3.6 TB per platter with Seagate's ten-platter Exos M drives using Mozaic 3+ HAMR technology.