Podcast: Areal density, AI design and the 50TB hard drive

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We talk to Seagate about hard disk drives, the use of artificial intelligence to design them with higher areal density, more terabytes per platter, and capacities up to 50TB, especially with HAMR recording

By

Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Published: 29 Nov 2024

In this podcast, Antony Adshead is joined by Jason Feist, senior vice-president for marketing in products and markets at Seagate, to look at how spinning disk can get to 40TB and 50TB.

We talk about hard disk drive technologies such as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that can boost areal density and pack more data onto disk platters.

Feist also talks about the future of hard disk drives (HDDs) and the use cases suited to them .

So, we’ve reached the low to mid-20s in terabyte (TB) terms in hard disk drives. How are HDD makers going to push capacity beyond what we’ve got today?

Great question. Thanks for the time this morning. It’s just an amazing time to be part of the hard drive industry. It’s transformative, it’s disruptive, and with all of the markets starting to rebound, it’s a great time to innovate and provide the ability to have data storage devices at scale.

The innovations that are underway right now are driven by a lot of contributions across many different disciplines. We have great engineers working in our supply chain to allow us to have mechanical innovations, to have recording physics innovations with magnetic recording, and to put more information on every disk inside a hard drive.

And we have amazing wafer and media metrology underway to continue to improve our process control, our repeatability and our ability to extract more areal density out of every drive. Areal density is really what’s at the forefront of development for hard drives.

It has been for years and will continue to be for years to come, and there’s a number of new techniques and new processes that we have access to, with technologies that are now becoming more readily available.

[These include] better simulation, more use of GPUs [graphics processing units] to do things with artificial intelligence [AI] to allow us to find design spaces that we didn’t have access to before with speed, and all that … Read More