HAMR don’t hurt ’em—laser-assisted hard drives are coming in 2020

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  This Seagate photo shows a HAMR actuator with its laser active. [credit: Seagate ]

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate promises that HAMR-Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording-hard drives in 18TB and 20TB models will be available in retail channels in 2020. The new drives use a medium that is less magnetically malleable at standard operating temperature than CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) media and, therefore, needs to be briefly and locally heated with a laser as data is written onto the media.

Seagate has been working on HAMR for a long time; the company's first big press release about the technology came in 2002. The promise has always been the same-higher areal densities, meaning more bits stored per square inch, with higher stability of data once written. The projected densities themselves have increased over the years, though-when Ars Technica first reported on Seagate and HAMR in 2012, the company was promising 6TB HAMR drives were just around the corner.

Although the 2012 "just around the corner" HAMR drives seem to have been mostly vapor, the technology is a reality now. Seagate has been trialing 16TB HAMR drives with select customers for more than a year and claims that the trials have proved that its HAMR drives are "plug and play replacements" for traditional CMR drives, requiring no special care and having no particular poor use cases compared to the drives we're all used to.

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