Seagate to launch 20TB consumer hard drives

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• Seagate to launch 20TB consumer hard drives

Seagate has confirmed plans to release a 20TB drive based on cost-effective perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology in the second half of this year. The announcement was made by Seagate CEO Dave Mosley during the company's second quarter 2021 earnings call. PMR, along with Shingle Magnetic Recording (SMR) technologies, are more cost-effective solutions than Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology that Seagate uses in its current line of 20TB drives that it offers to select partners. "We have extended our leadership in hard drive technology, as demonstrated by Seagate, which is the first company to commercialize HAMR technology and the first to offer performance dual actuator drives, which now ship in large volumes to withstand the load of various customers," Mosley said. In the call.

20 TB Battlefield

In response to a question, Mosley said the company is "very aggressive" with the 20 terabyte rating and is actually using all the tools in its arsenal to work on different products for different user segments. “We have several different 20 terabyte platforms on the way: PMR, SMR, HAMR. There are a lot of different flavors and they suit different customers, so different qualification timelines for everyone,” Mosley noted. He added that the company is already producing 18TB PMR-based drives in high volumes and is preparing to mass-produce 20TB PMR-based drives for delivery in the second half of the year. Meanwhile, Mosley noted that the rise of the Chia cryptocurrency, which requires more storage to mine, rather than process hacks, has increased demand for hard drives. Via Tom Hardware