Podcast #124: The Path to 50TB HDDs with Frickin Lasers

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Brian invited Seagate’s Colin Presly to the podcast this week to discuss research and developments in hard drives. Colin has been with Seagate for 20 years and is currently the Senior Director in the Office of the CTO. Originally from the UK, Colin moved to Minnesota over 20 years ago. The headline? HAMR is sampling with customers and 50TB HDDs are possible.

Brian invited Seagate’s Colin Presly to the podcast this week to discuss research and developments in hard drives. Colin has been with Seagate for 20 years and is currently the Senior Director in the Office of the CTO. Originally from the UK, Colin moved to Minnesota over 20 years ago. The headline? HAMR is sampling with customers and 50TB HDDs are possible.

Having grown up in the UK, Colin is a big sports enthusiast supporting teams like Liverpool Football Club (good pick), Formula 1, Rugby, and cricket. He is still a fan and continues to follow his teams from Shakopee, MN.

From a technology perspective, Colin considers himself to be an experienced engineering leader and technologist with over 20 years of broad technical and managerial experience in the disc drive industry. He has a proven track record managing diverse cross-functional teams, developing precision capital equipment, and productizing enterprise-quality disc drives.

After a few minutes of talking sports, Brian and Colin got serious about the real topic of this podcast: hard drives. The great thing about Colin is his enthusiasm for sport and technology.

This is a great discussion between two people who have been in the storage industry for a long time and still have the passion to get excited about what’s around the corner. Hear what is around the corner in hard drive development.

Streamed live with StorageReview Discord members.

Full video on YouTube

You should give this podcast a view in its entirety, but if you are stretched for time, the timestamp is below.

00:00 – Introduction

• Let’s talk sports
  • Football (real football).
  • Formula 1
  • Rugby
  • Cricket

05:00 – Let’s talk spinning disks

• Hard drive technology
• Open them up and see what actually goes into the hard drive
• Cloud is a hard drive
• Progressive increments in capacity
• What goes into the technology
• Hard drive inflection point for growth
• What are the limitations

10:00 – Hard drive direction

• Platters, heads, size, area
• Structure
• Preventing flipping bits
• Scale with larger platters
• Is 3.5 inches the right size going forward
• Hard to justify changing the HDD’s physical size
• Changing the size of the HDD is not the best approach

15:00 – Comparing Flash

• New ways to consume storage
• Hyperscalers
• Challenging in all sectors
• OCP
• We need the standards
• NVMe for hard drives?
• Watch this space – an exploration activity

20:00 – The appeal of one interface

• Convincing the market
• Hyperscalers have a major influence
• SMR
  • Writing wider tracks
  • Challenges on Read
  • PMR and CMR
  • Restrictions
  • Want to get to the next BIG step
  • ISOMER
  • HAMR- Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

25:00 – Intent to launch larger hard drive

• Game changer
• Increased drive capacity
• Shifts in data center technology take time
• A customer has nothing to change
• Plasmonic effect
• Heat in the media allows for changing media type

30:00 – Executing heating of an area

• Heat is localized – nanometers
• Heat makes the bit flip
• Seagate has put years of effort into the project
• Miniaturization journey

35:00 – Challenges in thermal and magnetic stability

• Directing heat to the interface
• Surviving that amount of heat
• Experiments to get where they are today
• HAMR is the next leap in technology
• Is HAMR a play for small drives
• Power consumption

40:00 – Replacing older 4TB drives with 20TB drives – energy savings

• Big demand for that 2TB increment can save operation costs
• Positive environmental impact
• The demand will drive development

45:00 – GenAI driving storage capacity

• Density is critical
  • Legal reasons to increase density
  • Political trends
  • Video
  • Keeping the data long-term

50:00 – Referencing CORVAULT 106 Drive System

• Multi-actuator
• Colin ran the program
• Splits in two inside the drive
• Creates a parallel operation
• Performance per TB

55:00 – Wrap-up

Seagate HAMR

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