Seagate introduced its Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform based on its Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology for achieving 3TB+ per platter—and a roadmap that will 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 up. Exos 30TB+ drives are shipping in volume this quarter to hyperscale cloud customers.
Seagate says that 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.
“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 CEO. “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.”
Additional highlights:
- Superlattice Platinum-Alloy Media . Fundamental physics of higher-density recording requires smaller media grain size at nanoscale. The challenge here is that smaller grains are more unstable. Legacy alloys do not provide sufficient magnetic stability for effective and reliable storage. In Mozaic 3+ hard drives, the media alloy uses a pioneering iron-platinum superlattice structure, which significantly increases the magnetic coercivity of disk media. This allows for precise data writing and unprecedented bit stability.
- Plasmonic Writer . Since the media are made magnetically “harder” to prevent instability, the design requires a revolutionary writer—a marvel of miniaturization and precision engineering that is Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR. Anchoring this technology is a nanophotonic laser, which produces an infinitesimal heat spot on the media surface to reliably write the data. Seagate plans to vertically integrate the nanophotonic laser into the plasmonic writer sub-system. “Developing this unique laser technology in-house for Mozaic 3+ will ensure even greater efficiency and yield to support rapid scaling of volume production,” Mosley said.
- Gen 7 Spintronic Reader. Smaller grains of written data are only useful if they can be read. Integrated along with the sub-components of the plasmonic writer, the reader also needed to evolve. Incorporating quantum technology, Mozaic 3+ includes one of the world’s smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors. 12nm
- Integrated Controller . Efficiently orchestrating all this technology called for an integrated controller, a system-on-a-chip, developed entirely in house. This sophisticated application-specific integrated circuit delivers up to 3 times the performance compared to prior solutions.