Seagate Starts Shipment of Extra High Capacity HAMR HDDs to Data Center Client

[T0@st]

Seagate is celebrating the debut shipment of very sophisticated storage solutions to a preferred client (dealing in the cloud data center sector). These 30+ terabyte hard drives are based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology - the American data storage company is setting up its next generation Corvault range with the thermal magnetic recording methodology. The first shipment of HAMR-based drives is reported to consist of final qualification samples, but Seagate is anticipating that fully verified equipment - after trial customers give this new product lineup a thumbs-up - will be generating revenue in the coming weeks.

According to a transcript of a recent Seagate financial meeting conference call, CEO Dave Mosley mentioned a dip in business as well as a costly legal settlement, but expects company fortunes to rise due to client uptake of breakthrough storage technologies: "Beyond this cycle, we remain excited about the long-term opportunities presented by the secular growth of data and the relevance of mass capacity storage as new data-centric applications emerge and more workloads migrate to the cloud. We continue to make strong progress on our industry-leading technology road map, including launching HAMR-based products this quarter, which we believe put us in outstanding longer-term position."



Mosley set out ambitious plans for its heat-assisted magnetic recording technology, with second generation drives targeted for release later in 2023. The CEO has high hopes for an upcoming Seagate Corvault product lineup in 2024 - revenue is expected to grow from a higher adoption rate of fully matured systems: "Our goal is to emerge a stronger, more agile company able to navigate well in all demand environments, return to profitable growth and preserve our technology leadership momentum. To that end, we have not let up on executing our HAMR-based product road map to preserve our significant time-to-market advantage. We are tracking well to our stated plans and achieved the key milestone last week of shipping initial qualification units to a cloud launch partner, and we expect to recognize initial revenue from 30-plus terabyte platforms this quarter as part of our Corvault system solutions. The decades of development that have led us to HAMR productization are even more important today as highly cost-efficient, mass capacity storage will be a competitive enabler in a world where data is rapidly growing and increasing in value. We believe HAMR will further extend the large and sustainable cost advantage multiple compared to other storage media, even with current market prices. Additionally, Seagate's ability to service this growing demand through areal density gains by increasing capacities from three to four to five terabytes per disc or more provides far greater capital efficiencies compared with current PMR technology over time."

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[RegaeRevaeb]

Seagate to WD: 'You can't touch this'?

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Will see. First real market offers to us like ordinary costumers maybe after one year.

 

[Karti]

I am still surprised someone did not come with a comment of type "who uses HDDs in *insert year here*"

 

[Bagerklestyne]

I'll take 8x thanks.

 

[Toothless]

I am still surprised someone did not come with a comment of type "who uses HDDs in *insert year here*"

Probably because most people are intelligent enough to understand that raw mass storage is still better on HDDs than SSDs in number of terabytes. When amount is needed more than speed the choice is obvious.

 

[mechtech]

"HAMR"

thanks a lot now I have this in my head

 

[A&P211]

I

Seagate to WD: 'You can't touch this'?

It's hammer time!!

 

[shadad]

I am still surprised someone did not come with a comment of type "who uses HDDs in *insert year here*"

Every time i come i read articles about this new HDD released i kept asking myself even this question and on all times waiting to see comments like that hahaha.

but for real, who uses HDDs in 2023 ?!

 

[Prima.Vera]

but for real, who uses HDDs in 2023 ?!

Like EVERYBODY in the business. Cloud Companies, Data Centers, Small Business, even end users. Still is most viable high capacity storage solution out there.

 

[Tomgang]

Over 30 tb storage on 1 hdd. Not bad, guess hdd still has a perpose.

I have 4 hdd and 5 ssd's in my pc with a combined storage capacity of 50 TB. Just to give an idea of how exciting 30 Tb or more is on 1 hdd.

Who uses hdd in 2023?
I do, but only for storage. Ssd for everything else.

 

[Bwaze]

Every time i come i read articles about this new HDD released i kept asking myself even this question and on all times waiting to see comments like that hahaha.

but for real, who uses HDDs in 2023 ?!

I still do? Hobby photography, a bit of videography, and I have terabytes upon terabytes of my files that I keep in a HDD in my PC, on auto backup on NAS and on one off site HDD that I update every month or two.

Several years ago when first 8 TB SATA SSDs we’re announced (Samsung 870 QVO) I hoped I’d soon change at least the drive in my PC to SSD - but it would be expensive, and slower than a HDD (QVO drives fall to 80 - 120 MB/s once you fill the cache), and since then no other drive challenged them, they’re just producing smaller drives with faster and faster speeds that bring absolutely nothing to user experience. :-(

 

[Toothless]

I still do? Hobby photography, a bit of videography, and I have terabytes upon terabytes of my files that I keep in a HDD in my PC, on auto backup on NAS and on one off site HDD that I update every month or two.

Several years ago when first 8 TB SATA SSDs we’re announced (Samsung 870 QVO) I hoped I’d soon change at least the drive in my PC to SSD - but it would be expensive, and slower than a HDD (QVO drives fall to 80 - 120 MB/s once you fill the cache), and since then no other drive challenged them, they’re just producing smaller drives with faster and faster speeds that bring absolutely nothing to user experience. :-(

You're basically stuck to going 4-8TB NVME, four drives on a hyper m.2 card. Expensive.

 

[Bones]

Anyone notice this "Preferred Client" hasn't been named?

Hmmmm...

 

[Bwaze]

You're basically stuck to going 4-8TB NVME, four drives on a hyper m.2 card. Expensive.

Technically I could go for 2 TB NVMe drives for 82 EUR a piece, cheap 4x PCIe to NVMe adapter and I could create an 8 TB drive for about 350 EUR - much cheaper than slow SATA Samsung 870 QVO - but I don’t want to bother.

 

[Hattu]

I am still surprised someone did not come with a comment of type "who uses HDDs in *insert year here*"

Just building up my first real server ever.

Only HDDs, old Xeons, pcie2 and DDR3 ATM.

And I can hear those fans in my bathroom, doors closed. and there's livingroom between them.

 

[Wirko]

Technically I could go for 2 TB NVMe drives for 82 EUR a piece, cheap 4x PCIe to NVMe adapter and I could create an 8 TB drive for about 350 EUR - much cheaper than slow SATA Samsung 870 QVO - but I don’t want to bother.

Then you would need support for 4+4+4+4 lane splitting, but on Core/Ryzen platforms, it's questionable at best.

 

[LabRat 891]

What's data retention like on HAMR? (IIRC, SMR could become unreadable with time.)

Probably because most people are intelligent enough to understand that raw mass storage is still better on HDDs than SSDs in number of terabytes. When amount is needed more than speed the choice is obvious.

Agreed, but with caveat.

More than a couple companies have 12-24+TB NAND drives 'in the works'

IMO, there's little reason to get excited over HAMR (in consumer drives) if it's just as liable to bitrot like NANDflash.

 

[A&P211]

Every time i come i read articles about this new HDD released i kept asking myself even this question and on all times waiting to see comments like that hahaha.

but for real, who uses HDDs in 2023 ?!

My cousin bought a 4tb WD black HD for $60. Most 4tb SSDs are still over $300. I gave him one of old intel 660p 2tb for SSD drive. He was able to get a better gpu for the money he save on getting a HD.

 

[MHzTweaker]

You could not pay me cash money to use a Seagate product. Not after throwing 9 of them in the trash due to high numbers of bad sectors.
Back then my servers were stuttering, freezing and rebooting because of these Seagate drives.

Use HDSentinel to keep tabs on your drive's health.

I replaced them with HGST 7200 RPM drives and since WD purchased Hitachi Global Storage, I started buying WD Red Pro drives. I currently have about 28 Red Pro's and a few HGST drives installed in 2 media servers (Primary and a Backup Server). The smallest drives are 6TB and I currently buy WD 22TB drives as I upgrade out the smaller ones.

Since I stopped buying Seagate drives 8 years ago, I have not had to replace a single spinning drive in either server. Both servers are connected to UPS batteries and PowerVAR torroidial power filter systems.

I never saw a cent of relief from their crappy products. Their warranties are worthless. You pay to send them a drive and they send you back some suckers patched up refurbished drive that fails in a week. Wash rinse, repeat.

Seagate slapped with a class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rates

Seagate faces a lawsuit over allegedly high failure rates in 3 TB consumer hard drives.

www.pcworld.com

Seagate faces class-action lawsuit over 3TB hard drive failure rates

Seagate is facing down a lawsuit on high failure rates on its ST3000DM001 HDDs. Reports from corporate users indicate the drives fail quickly, and not according to typical patterns.

www.extremetech.com

Class-Action Lawsuit Against Seagate Built On Questionable Backblaze Reliability Report

The Hagens Berman law firm has files a class-action lawsuit against Seagate in regard to its 3 TB Barracuda models, and even cited the Backblaze "reliability report" as one of its key pieces of evidence.

www.tomshardware.com

Their history is littered with shady business practices.

Also be careful of spinners with S.M.R. drive tech (Shingled Magnetic Recording)

Seagate Guilty of Undisclosed SMR on Certain Internal Hard Drive Models, Too: Report

Earlier this week, Western Digital was in the line of fire when it emerged that several of its WD Red family of "NAS-optimized" hard drives allegedly employ some form of shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a physical-layer data writing technique that maximizes density at a heavy cost of random...

www.techpowerup.com

Then there's the performance HIT

CMR vs. SMR Hard Drives: What's the Difference?

There's a performance penalty with some drives that you need to be aware of.

www.howtogeek.com

Whether or not HAMR is reliable, I will wait for someone ELSE to beta test these products for a few years.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Well I for one use HDD's for my huge photo library. I'm not spending a cent on an overpriced 8TB garbage QLC ssd with p!ss poor endurance.

 

[Wirko]

Well I for one use HDD's for my huge photo library. I'm not spending a cent on an overpriced 8TB garbage QLC ssd with p!ss poor endurance.

The issue with QLC is that you and I, and many others, don't believe it will survive those ~300 write cycles. If we were confident that it's reliable, or at least gives out SMART warnings before magic smoke, the write cycles would suffice for almost everything, and certainly for a collection of files that mostly grows and is rarely rewtitten.

 

[LabRat 891]

You could not pay me cash money to use a Seagate product. Not after throwing 9 of them in the trash due to high numbers of bad sectors.
Back then my servers were stuttering, freezing and rebooting because of these Seagate drives.

Use HDSentinel to keep tabs on your drive's health.

I replaced them with HGST 7200 RPM drives and since WD purchased Hitachi Global Storage, I started buying WD Red Pro drives. I currently have about 28 Red Pro's and a few HGST drives installed in 2 media servers (Primary and a Backup Server). The smallest drives are 6TB and I currently buy WD 22TB drives as I upgrade out the smaller ones.

Since I stopped buying Seagate drives 8 years ago, I have not had to replace a single spinning drive in either server. Both servers are connected to UPS batteries and PowerVAR torroidial power filter systems.

I never saw a cent of relief from their crappy products. Their warranties are worthless. You pay to send them a drive and they send you back some suckers patched up refurbished drive that fails in a week. Wash rinse, repeat.

Seagate slapped with a class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rates

Seagate faces a lawsuit over allegedly high failure rates in 3 TB consumer hard drives.

www.pcworld.com

Seagate faces class-action lawsuit over 3TB hard drive failure rates

Seagate is facing down a lawsuit on high failure rates on its ST3000DM001 HDDs. Reports from corporate users indicate the drives fail quickly, and not according to typical patterns.

www.extremetech.com

Class-Action Lawsuit Against Seagate Built On Questionable Backblaze Reliability Report

The Hagens Berman law firm has files a class-action lawsuit against Seagate in regard to its 3 TB Barracuda models, and even cited the Backblaze "reliability report" as one of its key pieces of evidence.

www.tomshardware.com

Their history is littered with shady business practices.

Also be careful of spinners with S.M.R. drive tech (Shingled Magnetic Recording)

Seagate Guilty of Undisclosed SMR on Certain Internal Hard Drive Models, Too: Report

Earlier this week, Western Digital was in the line of fire when it emerged that several of its WD Red family of "NAS-optimized" hard drives allegedly employ some form of shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a physical-layer data writing technique that maximizes density at a heavy cost of random...

www.techpowerup.com

Then there's the performance HIT

CMR vs. SMR Hard Drives: What's the Difference?

There's a performance penalty with some drives that you need to be aware of.

www.howtogeek.com

Whether or not HAMR is reliable, I will wait for someone ELSE to beta test these products for a few years.

Good man. Thanks for bringing 'receipts'.
I knew there were more reasons (to personally blacklist Seagate) than my 1st 1TB drive "self-terminating" via firmware.

The issue with QLC is that you and I, and many others, don't believe it will survive those ~300 write cycles. If we were confident that it's reliable, or at least gives out SMART warnings before magic smoke, the write cycles would suffice for almost everything, and certainly for a collection of files that mostly grows and is rarely rewtitten.

Correct. Write amplification, and by extension Service Life, is a real bitch on QLC.
There's fixes though.
Ex: P1600Xs are $35-60 right now. QLC drive + primocache + optane = long-lived and fast QLC SSD.

Should i buy primocache?

Update with the corrected settings - I made sure to preload/reuse the cache this time, not make a new one each boot on the read-only (which accidentally had write buffering on too) and set it to preload. I mostly play the same games anyway, so why not. There's a slider to set the amount used...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[A&P211]

I still do? Hobby photography, a bit of videography, and I have terabytes upon terabytes of my files that I keep in a HDD in my PC, on auto backup on NAS and on one off site HDD that I update every month or two.

Several years ago when first 8 TB SATA SSDs we’re announced (Samsung 870 QVO) I hoped I’d soon change at least the drive in my PC to SSD - but it would be expensive, and slower than a HDD (QVO drives fall to 80 - 120 MB/s once you fill the cache), and since then no other drive challenged them, they’re just producing smaller drives with faster and faster speeds that bring absolutely nothing to user experience. :-(

I have one of those, the top speed will be 150mb/s. The speed on the 860 qvo 8tb is 75mb/s. I quickly returned that thing to Amazon.

 

[Bagerklestyne]

Seagate slapped with a class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rates

Seagate faces a lawsuit over allegedly high failure rates in 3 TB consumer hard drives.

www.pcworld.com

Seagate faces class-action lawsuit over 3TB hard drive failure rates

Seagate is facing down a lawsuit on high failure rates on its ST3000DM001 HDDs. Reports from corporate users indicate the drives fail quickly, and not according to typical patterns.

www.extremetech.com

Class-Action Lawsuit Against Seagate Built On Questionable Backblaze Reliability Report

The Hagens Berman law firm has files a class-action lawsuit against Seagate in regard to its 3 TB Barracuda models, and even cited the Backblaze "reliability report" as one of its key pieces of evidence.

www.tomshardware.com

Their history is littered with shady business practices.

Also be careful of spinners with S.M.R. drive tech (Shingled Magnetic Recording)

In fairness - 3tb drives are from 12 years ago now.

Nothing wrong with SMR drives in the right circumstances, that's what WD are using as well.

I feel your pain in the failure of drives, but I've had the opposite experience, only killed WD drives, only lost 1 seagate due to user error (namely dropping a house key on an exposed operating drive which cause an arc across the pcb)

I still have a functioning 40 meg Seagate drive from 1994 (it was second hand at that time too)

I'll be your HAMR guinea pig when I can lay my hands upon them for a reasonable price per TB.