Seagate Technology Holdings plc (Seage) has unveiled the new Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform, featuring Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. It also boasts areal densities exceeding 3TB per platter.
The platform, powering Seagate’s flagship Exos product family, now offers capacities of 30TB and more, with shipments to hyperscale cloud customers already underway.
Seagate’s areal density innovation addresses industry challenges, allowing customers to store more data within the same physical space. Upgrading from a 16TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drive to an Exos 30TB Mozaic 3+ drive effectively doubles capacity within the same footprint. The platform maintains material compatibility with PMR hard drives while achieving substantial capacity increases, leading to a 40% improvement in per-terabyte power consumption.
Read:
VSTECS named exclusive distributor for Seagate’s enterprise data storage in PH
Seagate’s collectible Spider-Man FireCuda HDDs now available on PH
Mozaic 3+ also contributes to sustainability goals by offering a 55% reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte compared to traditional 16TB PMR drives. The platform anticipates strong demand from data center customers, with qualification and volume ramp expected by the end of the quarter.
AI use cases
“As AI use cases put a premium on raw data sets, more companies are going to need to store all the data they can,” said Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate. “To accommodate the resulting masses of data, areal density matters more than ever.”
The Mozaic 3+ platform incorporates several industry-first innovations, including a superlattice platinum-alloy media that enhances magnetic stability, a plasmonic writer with a nanophotonic laser for precise data writing, and a Gen 7 Spintronic Reader for reading smaller grains of written data.
The platform features a 12nm integrated controller, ensuring efficient orchestration of technologies, delivering up to three times the performance of previous solutions. Seagate plans to vertically integrate the nanophotonic laser into the plasmonic writer sub-system for increased efficiency and production scalability.
The areal density improvements align with industry needs, allowing Seagate to deliver higher capacity hard drive products for diverse applications, from data centers to enterprise, edge, NAS, and video and imaging applications (VIA) markets.