- Despite predictions, HDDs are here to remain and increase capacity
- Seagate recently sold an exabyte of Hamr -storage to two hyperscalers
- “Tens of thousands of drives” probably cost between $ 33 and $ 35 million
Although like pure storage, IBM and META believe that writing is on the wall of hard drives, the technology does not look like it is soon disappearing.
Seagate and its most important Rival Western Digital are working on magnetic recording methods that allow the drives to continue to increase capacity, which helps them maintain a clear advantage over SSDs when it comes to storage density.
The most important technology that leads this charge is Hamr or Heat Assistant Magnetic Recording, which could see HDDs hit incredible 100 TB of capabilities. Hamr works by short heating the disk surface with a laser to make it easier to write data with higher densities. HDMR – short to heated dot magnetic recording – is Hamr’s probable successor and can lead to even greater drives by focusing the heat and magnetic energy in smaller, more accurate areas for even closer data storage.
Not an unreasonable outlay
In a recent one The Wall Street Journal Article, John Keilman, wrote an article covering Seagate’s “Fight to Great World Data,” and mentioned something that caught my attention. “Seagate said two large cloud-computing customers each ordered an Exabyte’s value of Hamr storage that works for tens of thousands of hard drives.”
Keilman did not name names – Seagate would not have told him who the buyers were – but we can narrow the list of suspects to the usual large American hyperscalers including Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta. It is possible that Chinese hyperscalers could have come shopping after the drives, but it seems unlikely to me.
Keilman does not say what capacity drives were sold, but we can assume that they will have been Seagate’s highest commercial HDD, Exos M, ranging from 30TB (CMR) to 36TB (SMR), with a breakthrough 3TB-Per-Per-Platter density. Based on timing, we are likely to talk about the 30TB models when the 32TB drive was first added to the range in December 2024, followed by the 36TB model only a month later.
Assuming that the hyperscalers paid bulk prices of about $ 500 per Drive (Renovated Models of Seagates Exos 28TB HDD can currently be purchased for as low as $ 365), their total bill probably came somewhere between $ 33 and $ 35 million. For a full exabyte of pioneering high capacity storage, $ 16 billion is not an unreasonable outlay.
Seagate previously revealed that a 60 TB drive was on the way, and the company recently announced plans to acquire Invac, a Hamr Specialist who could help it reach this 100 TB capacity goal faster, as well as ramp up Hamr Drive production.
