Seagate is now shipping 44 terabyte hard drives in volume
The manufacturer Seagate has a new generation of hard drives available that is equipped with storage capacities of up to 44 terabytes. According to the company, corresponding products are already being delivered to customers in larger quantities.
Data center storage
The drives are called “Mozaic 4+” and are primarily intended for large cloud data centers. The first customers to receive significant quantities are two unnamed hyperscale cloud providers. The technology of the new hard drives is based on the Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) process.
The surface of the hard drive is briefly heated with a laser while writing. This allows significantly higher data densities to be achieved without affecting the long-term stability of the stored information. For years, HAMR was considered a promising but difficult future technology in the industry. Seagate now sees the breakthrough as having been achieved.
With the new platform, the company doesn’t want to stay at 44 terabytes. According to the development plan, the storage density should increase in the long term from the current four terabytes per magnetic disk to around ten terabytes. This could potentially enable hard drives with a total capacity of up to 100 terabytes.
The need is there
The availability of such storage comes at just the right time for data center operators. The AI era in particular is driving up demand massively. AI models are trained with huge amounts of data – including videos, logs, training data sets or synthetically generated content. For cost reasons, the majority of this data is not stored on expensive flash memory, but on classic hard drives.
Seagate argues that larger drives also increase data center efficiency. In an installation with one exabyte of storage capacity, the new hard drives could improve infrastructure efficiency by around 47 percent, according to the company. At the same time, the space required in the data center and energy consumption could be significantly reduced.
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