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

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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6 months ago

Harold Fritts

I have been in the tech industry since IBM created Selectric. My background, though, is writing. So I decided to get out of the pre-sales biz and return to my roots, doing a bit of writing but still being involved in technology.