Seagate will release 20TB HDDs with pmr technology later this year

Seagate expects to ship 20 terabyte hard drives in the second half of the year. This still concerns HDDs based on perpendicular magnetic recording, but Seagate also comes with 20TB HDDs based on SMR and Hamr.

The expectation that Seagate will start shipping 20TB PMR drives in the second half of 2021 is expressed by Seagate CEO Dave Mosley in the publication of the company’s quarterly figures. In response to questions, he explained that he expects production, sampling and qualification of the 20TB PMR HDDs to progress well as Seagate is already widely producing heads and storage media for 18TB and lower capacity PMR drives. .

In addition, he reports that Seagate will come with several 20TB platforms, also with HDDs based on SMR and Hamr. “There are a lot of different flavors and they’re aimed at different customers, so they each have their own qualifying schedule,” Mosley said, according to the transcript on Seeking Alpha. The introduction periods for the different 20TB are therefore not yet known.

In fact, Seagate already has 20TB hamr-based HDDs available, but only for a select group of customers. The manufacturer does not yet produce them in large numbers, because they only become cost-effective with 24TB and higher storage capacities.

PMR is the conventional technique in which magnetic fields stand upright on the disc surface. The limits in terms of storage density are now in sight. This storage density can be slightly increased by applying shingled magnetic recording, in which the data tracks partly overlap.

This SMR technique is already being used, but has some drawbacks in terms of performance. Hamr stands for heat-assisted magnetic recording and this is a complex and expensive technique that Seagate has been working on for years and that should ensure higher storage densities. Hamr uses laser writing heads.