Seagate is pushing up the storage limit of classic hard drives. With the introduction of the “Mozaic 3+” platform, users now have up to 30 TB of storage space available. We summarize all the important information for you.
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The basis of the new hard drives is the so-called Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording Technology, or HAMR for short. This enables an impressive surface density of 3 TB per disk, although 4 or 5 TB should even be possible in the future.
Another plus point is the reduced power consumption. For comparison, a typical CMR drive with an areal density of 1.78 TB/disk consumes 0.59 watts per TB. A Seagate Exos 30 TB drive with “Mozaic 3+” technology and an areal density of 3 TB/disk, on the other hand, only consumes 0.35 watts per TB. A minus of around 40 percent.
The form factor remains unchanged. The hard drives still come in the familiar 3.5-inch format, which ensures compatibility with all typical PC systems and data centers. There is no change to the guarantee either. Like the rest of Seagate’s Exos series, the new hard drives also come with a 5-year warranty with 2.5 million hours of MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) and 550 TB per year.
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This is how Mozaic 3+ works
Higher density recording requires smaller nanoscale media grains. However, smaller grains are more unstable and a conventional alloy does not provide sufficient magnetic stability. To increase the magnetic coercive force, a special iron-platinum superlattice structure is used.
Because the media is magnetically “hardened” to prevent instability, the design also requires a new write head. A nanophotonic laser that creates a tiny point of heat on the media surface reliably writes the data to the hard drive. Seagate plans to vertically integrate the nanophotonic laser into the plasmonic writing device subsystem.
The reader also had to be adjusted. According to Seagate, the “Mozaic 3+” platform is said to contain one of the smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors in the world. Everything is controlled via a specially developed 12 nm controller, which is said to offer three times higher performance compared to previous solutions.
What is Mozaic 3+ suitable for?
The generally increasing amount of data continually presents companies and ambitious end users with storage challenges. Especially with the growing importance of AI, the need for storage space is increasing rapidly. Advanced technologies like Mozaic 3+ provide an efficient way to expand storage capacity without consuming additional resources and having to rework the rest of the system.
Mozaic 3+ is a hard drive architecture that offers significantly higher capacity without additional power or resource consumption. The models are also cost-effective and the price per terabyte can be reduced compared to conventional hard drives. Data-hungry applications that will benefit from the developments include machine learning, streaming services and medical research databases.