Seagate Brings World’s First 16TB 3.5-inch Hard Drive

Seagate 16TB HAMR Hard Drive Is Rolled out

Since BM successfully developed the world’s first computer disk storage device on September 13, 1956, hard drives have always been based on Winchester structures. Obviously, this traditional hard disk structure has been unable to meet users’ needs in the context of increasing data storage.

As you know, Data Age is upcoming. As data capture and creation at the edge increases sharply, people are more and more eager for large storage capacity and booming Artificial Intelligence applications need the access to ever-larger datasets so as to extract crucial learnings. Affordable and easy-to-deploy large-capacity storage products can help digitize the world.

Seagate has developed HAMR technology (heat-assisted magnetic recording) to achieve a large growth in the amount of data that can be saved to hard disks.

The HAMR technology uses a small laser diode attached to each recording heads to heat a spot on the hard drive. And this technique enables the recording heads to flip the magnetic polarity of each stable bit for data written.

The data bit or grains can be packed more densely onto the magnetic media and remaining extremely stable.

Recently, this company has announced it achieves another major milestone towards volume shipments of its pioneering HAMR technology.

It claims to have successfully built and tested the world’s first formatted and fully functioning enterprise 16TB hard drive, which is in a standard 3.5-inch form factor. This is the largest hard drive in capacity ever produced. At present, the new HAMR-based version of its Exos drive is targeting enterprise customers.

HAMR Drives Are Plug-and-play

It is confirmed that Seagate 16TB hard drive can operate like any other plug-and-play enterprise drive in a standard suite of integration benchmarks on the market, which meet the expectations of Seagate for how a drive should interact in each benchmark.

According to Jason Feist, Seagate’s Senior Director of Enterprise Product Line Management, Seagate has started running early Exos HAMR units via the full set of standard benchmark tests. This company says that their testing has proved that this drive is compatible with the enterprise systems that are being used today.

And running Seagate HAMR-based Exos hard drive in these evaluations or deploying them in customer environments doesn’t need system-level changes.

Feist says that these tests are consistent with the customer’s test feedback, including power efficiency, SCSI device command tests, standard smartmontools utility (enable customers to characterize and compare HAMR drives in their environment right next to PMR drives) and several four-corners tests (focus on read, write, random, sequential, and mixed workloads).

During these tests, Seagate HAMT read/write heads far exceeded the standards in the industry for reliability and lifetime data transfer capability. This will let Seagate offer high-capacity enterprise product, for example, Seagate 16TB HAMR hard drive.

Final Words

Currently, there is not any word about the availability and pricing for this Seagate 16TB hard drive. If you are interested in this hard drive, please pay attention to the Seagate website. And once it is available, you can purchase one and use it to save much data.

Update on May 18, 2019:

Now, Seagate starts shipping the 16TB HDD. But according to Seagate, the hard drive doesn’t use next-generation HAMR technology; instead, it is based around more contemporary perpendicular magnetic recording PMR, which is being boosted by TDMR (two-dimensional magnetic recording).

The 16TB 3.5-inch helium-filled hard drive is using nine PMR + TDMR-based platters. The previous disk features 8 platters.