Seagate has announced the mass production of its 30 TB HAMR HDDs, expected to hit the market as soon as this quarter. These drives will be the first to leverage Heat Assisted Media Recording (HAMR), kickstarting the Mozaic 3+ platform. It features new read and write heads, redesigned controllers, and revamped media. Mozaic will power Seagate’s Exos 30 TB and higher HDDs slated to arrive in the coming months.
Seagate Mozaic 3+ leverages 10 glass disks composed of a magnetic layer that boosts longevity while reducing the grain size. It adopts a nanoplasmonic writer paired with a nanophotonic laser that heats the media (hence, heat-assisted) before recording. These nanoscopic recordings are read using Seagate’s Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, marketed as the “world’s smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensor.”
The Mozaic 3+ has a new controller to go along with the recorder and the reader/writer. Fabbed on a 12nm process node, the controller promises to offer thrice the computational performance as its predecessor. We’re likely looking at a custom RISC-V design tailor-made for high-density storage solutions.
Seagate is the first vendor to introduce its HAMR offerings. Its 30 TB SKUs are slated to ship in the latter half of this quarter. Seagate plans to launch 40 TB+ HDDs as part of its Mozaic 4+ platform, followed by 50 TB+ products as part of Mozaic 5+ close to 2030. You can expect a variety of products based on this platform, including enterprise, NAS, VIA, and more.
