If things go as currently planned, Seagate will launch a 100TB hard disk drive (HDD) in less than a decade, which is more than five times the capacity of today's biggest HDDs. Then sometime after 2030, it will push single-drive storage capacities even further, to 120TB and beyond.
Even if Seagate needs to adjust its recently updated storage roadmap at some point, the fact that much bigger capacities are on the horizon reiterate that HDDs are not dead. Just the opposite, they accounted for over a zettabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of shipped storage last year. The need for bulk storage is continually growing, and that's not going to change anytime soon.
If you head over to Newegg, the largest HDDs available are 18TB. There are several different models starting at around $400. Among them is Seagate's 18TB Exos X18, a standard 3.5-inch SATA HDD stuffed with nine platters, that is intended for the enterprise market.
Part of Seagate's effort to massively increase storage capacities rests on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.
"HAMR is a technology designed to enable the next big increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a hard drive. It uses a new kind of media magnetic technology on each disk that allows data bits, or grains, to become smaller and more densely packed than ever, while remaining magnetically stable. A small laser diode attached to each recording head heats a tiny spot on the disk, which enables the recording head to flip the magnetic polarity of each very stable bit, enabling data to be written," Seagate explains.
"As we approach the maximum useful capacity of PMR technology, each successive drive increases by 1TB or 2TB at a time," said Jeff Fochtman, Seagate's senior vice president of business and marketing. "With HAMR technology, it allows us to jump in steps of 4 terabytes, 6 terabytes, or even 10 terabytes at a time."
