Many people wonder how save data at home or at work. Not only do you need to install the system on the hard drive, but you also need somewhere to store several seasons of your favorite series, photos of friends and family, videos with cats, and games also need a lot of space. And if you work with larger volumes of information, the problems become even greater. But data centers are even more demanding. And everyone needs large drives. Seagate presented the largest hard driveand its characteristics are truly impressive.

The largest hard drive

Humanity generates more and more data, and it needs to be stored somewhere, so world leaders in the production of drives are constantly inventing something new. Yes, last year Western Digital announced 28 TB drives, but now its main competitor has shown a 30 TB novelty. Seagate Exos Mosaic 3+, and said that it will release a 32 TB model in the near future. But that’s not all.

At the heart of the hard disk with the largest capacity are 10 plates of 3 TB eachand soon the manufacturer plans to increase the capacity of each plate to 5 TB, all the more increasing the total volume of the drive.

How HDD works

How does a hard disk drive (HDD) work? Let’s look inside and find out all the secrets!

The plates rotate inside, and at a distance of several nanometers from them there is a head that magnetizes certain sectors or, conversely, reads information. The disc rotates, the “rocker” with the head moves, and all this with great speed.

The basis of the operation of the new drive is HAMR thermal hybrid recording technology (Heat-assisted magnetic recording) which allowed to increase HDD capacity. At the same time, it kept its physical size at the level of the 3.5-inch form factor, weight and relatively low noise level.

You might think that HAMR technology is new, but it’s not, because work on it began by Seagate back in 1998, and 20 years later – in 2018 – the first hard drive that worked on it was presented. It had a capacity of 16 TB, which is also a lot.

During the operation of the HDD created according to this technology, the plates are heated to a high temperature with the help of a vertical nanophoton laser. Achievements are reported local temperature of 400–500 degrees Celsius. This allows you to magnetize sectors with a relatively weak magnet. One might think that the temperature affects the properties of the plates, but neither the chemical nor the physical properties of the plates have any effect. Instead, the technology made it possible to increase the speed of sequential reading and writing. As a bonus, thanks to the use of HAMR, the disks have high resistance to external magnetic influences. By the way, about how not to lose saved datawe also have a separate video.

The creation of a new recording method necessitated the creation of a new read head. The need for this arose due to the fact that the data are recorded more densely and it was impossible to consider them as previously used methods. According to Seagate itself, the Gen 7 Spintronic Reader is the smallest and the world’s most sensitive magnetic field sensor.

And the updated components required the creation of a new chipset to manage the entire drive. It was developed by Seagate specialists, but all that is known about it is that it is built on a 12nm process and is most likely based on the RISC-V architecture. There are no other details, but they are not that important, to be honest.

How much is the largest HDD

Interestingly, despite the innovation, the cost of the drive has not increased dramatically and remains comparable to other similar drives. The exact price has not yet been announced, but most likely it will be set at the level 450-460 dollarswhich corresponds to the average market order in $15 per terabyte. First of all, it is a corporate product, which has already attracted the interest of many data centers, providers and companies with their own data centers. But, nevertheless, buy such a drive in a store XCOM-SHOP.RU everyone can.

If you want to buy such an HDD, you still have time to save money. But for the home, it is better to choose something smaller, like 22 TB Seagate driveor more modest Western Digital on 4 TB. And for backup data storage, you should pay attention to a good external hard drive.

Shipments should begin in the first quarter of 2024, but some Seagate Exos Mozaic 3+ are already being installed in Seagate Exos Corvault data storage systems. These SHDs are a 4U form factor rack with 106 HDDs placed inside, connected using the SAS interface.

Naturally, Seagate plans to stop at 30 TB and is preparing to create the fourth generation of the Mozaic platform, which will provide HDDs with a capacity of up to 40 TB, and in the fifth generation we expect 50 TB.