Wednesday, January 17th 2024

Seagate's Breakthrough 30TB+ HDDs Ramp Volume

Seagate Technology, a world leader in sustainable mass-data storage solutions, today announced a milestone that marks a new era in the storage industry. The company launched the Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform—which incorporates Seagate's trailblazing implementation of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. The launch heralds unparalleled areal densities of 3 TB+ per platter—and a roadmap that will achieve 4 TB+ and 5 TB+ 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 30 TB and beyond. Exos 30 TB+ products are shipping in volume this quarter to hyperscale cloud customers. Seagate's areal density innovation—which increases the number of bits that can be stored on a platter—addresses common industry pain points. Mozaic 3+ enables customers to store more data in the same floor space than ever before. Upgrading from a 16 TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drive (the average capacity in large-scale data centers) to an Exos 30 TB Mozaic 3+ technology drive effectively doubles capacity in the same footprint.
The platform uses roughly the same material components as PMR hard drives while dramatically increasing capacity, allowing data centers to significantly lower storage acquisition and operational costs—including a 40% improvement in per terabyte power consumption. Mozaic 3+ can also help customers achieve sustainability goals—a top priority for large-scale data centers—by offering a 55% reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte (when comparing a 30 TB Mozaic 3+ drive with a traditional 16 TB PMR drive).

Seagate is experiencing strong demand from data center customers that are expected to complete qualification of Mozaic 3+ and move into volume ramp by end of this quarter. A leading cloud service provider is focused on ramping of Seagate-provided drives to Mozaic 3+, reflecting their confidence in the technology.

"Seagate is the world's only hard drive manufacturer with the areal density capability to get to 3 TB per platter and with 5 TB 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."

"The Mozaic 3+ platform represents more than just HAMR technology," Mosley noted. "It comprises several industry-first innovations that we've integrated to help us scale areal density."

Here are a few 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.
  • 12 nm 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.
  • "Hard drive areal density improvements are critical for economically and efficiently expanding the installed base of hard drive-based mass storage, especially in data centers," said John Rydning, Research Vice President, IDC Global DataSphere. "Seagate's innovative areal density breakthrough is timely and will enable it to deliver increasingly higher capacity hard drive products for many years."
In addition to data centers, Mozaic 3+ storage technology will enable a wide range of use cases, ranging from enterprise, to edge, NAS, and video and imaging applications (VIA) markets.

To learn more about Mozaic 3+ technologies and products, visit this page. Images and supplementary materials can be found here.
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14 Comments on Seagate's Breakthrough 30TB+ HDDs Ramp Volume

#1
JAB Creations
Mechanical drive prices need to come down. I'm at an odd place where I need to choose between low capacity SSDs (8TB) or high capacity HDDs (16TB) for a mass storage upgrade and the prices don't feel justified for mechanical drives any more.
Posted on Reply
#2
remixedcat
JAB CreationsMechanical drive prices need to come down. I'm at an odd place where I need to choose between low capacity SSDs (8TB) or high capacity HDDs (16TB) for a mass storage upgrade and the prices don't feel justified for mechanical drives any more.
I'm to the point I need storage very badly... down to only 400GB free on my main rig... I wanna get a dell poweredge server eventually and use that but ho-lee-phuck getting the drives will be more expensive than the friggin server!
Posted on Reply
#3
xSneak
Aren't these going to be DOA if they are just single actuator drives ? I don't see how someone would bother with using one of these when the rebuild time would be multiple days for a single drive.
Posted on Reply
#4
jesdals
I would like a 3TB one disk drive just for the heck of it but its seems the desktop normal disk stay on the old proces
Posted on Reply
#5
Courier 6
I would love to have one of those, all that space, I don´t care if it´s slower
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#6
remixedcat
Courier 6I would love to have one of those, all that space, I don´t care if it´s slower
same. I neeed it badly!
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#7
unwind-protect
Courier 6I would love to have one of those, all that space, I don´t care if it´s slower
One RAID does not make.
Posted on Reply
#9
DaemonForce
remixedcatI'm to the point I need storage very badly... down to only 400GB free on my main rig...
Good call. This is the current situation on my main server


Just sayin, don't let things get down to imaginary percentage figures before a migration. It's not fun.
Posted on Reply
#10
remixedcat
DaemonForceGood call. This is the current situation on my main server


Just sayin, don't let things get down to imaginary percentage figures before a migration. It's not fun.
ouch! is that your main system? what about your others?
Posted on Reply
#11
DaemonForce
remixedcatouch! is that your main system? what about your others?
Main server. Athlon 64, 2GB, 1GbE+10GbE it's basically safe storage, iSCSI, SQL .NET web, maybe UT99 and WoT if I can ever get the ports right again.
Workstation is more like this:


That last one is portable scratch for VMs. It's fine for what it is but I have tons of games and unused packages that really should be offloaded to accessory storage. My plan is to build iSCSI volumes to offload my Steam, Epic, Xbox and other libraries socketed over 10GbE SFP because not only is nVidia 1GbE a DOG, the 4TB HDD over sata II averages ~110MB/s across 70% of the drive. My 16TB is on standby and I still need to bench it and all this other stuff but people report ~275MB/s sequential. It's still not enough to saturate sata 3GB/s so good enough for me. ✓
Posted on Reply
#12
remixedcat
DaemonForceMain server. Athlon 64, 2GB, 1GbE+10GbE it's basically safe storage, iSCSI, SQL .NET web, maybe UT99 and WoT if I can ever get the ports right again.
Workstation is more like this:


That last one is portable scratch for VMs. It's fine for what it is but I have tons of games and unused packages that really should be offloaded to accessory storage. My plan is to build iSCSI volumes to offload my Steam, Epic, Xbox and other libraries socketed over 10GbE SFP because not only is nVidia 1GbE a DOG, the 4TB HDD over sata II averages ~110MB/s across 70% of the drive. My 16TB is on standby and I still need to bench it and all this other stuff but people report ~275MB/s sequential. It's still not enough to saturate sata 3GB/s so good enough for me. ✓
Ouch!!! Yeah you need that drive too lol
Posted on Reply
#13
JAB Creations
remixedcatI'm to the point I need storage very badly... down to only 400GB free on my main rig... I wanna get a dell poweredge server eventually and use that but ho-lee-phuck getting the drives will be more expensive than the friggin server!
Dell is proprietary trash! Don't make the same mistake that so many others make. I need to merge my two mass storage RAID 1 arrays in to a single RAID 1 array with 16TB+ though I have a bit more space than you do.
Posted on Reply
#14
Prima.Vera
30TB is fine. But why those HDD producers are still keeping the callous prices?
The HDD drives prices needs to come down. Currently there is no longer a justification paying premium over any SSD.
Posted on Reply
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