Seagate wants to offer a capacity of 32 TB with its first HAMR hard drive. Copies with more space are also planned.

Seagate is lifting part of the veil on its future hard drives based on Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. HAMR ensures that more bits and bytes fit on the same disk. The higher density allows for larger capacity hard drives. Seagate and its competitor Western Digital have been tinkering with HAMR drives for years.

Seagate’s first HAMR hard drive will be based on the second version of HAMR technology and will have a capacity of 32 TB. The drive itself will consist of ten 3.2TB physical hard drives. Seagate then wants to increase the capacity of each drive to launch 36TB, 40TB, and eventually even 50TB HAMR drives.

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Seagate remains unclear as to actual launch plans for its HAMR drives. The first drives are scheduled to be available today in limited numbers from key data center customers. HAMR drives are expected to roll off the assembly line on a larger scale in the third quarter of this year. Such large capacity hard drives are of particular interest in the data center world, where the higher density of drives allows for greater storage capacity without increasing the footprint within the data center.

Seagate also advises that PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) may be phased out. In the future, HAMR technology will also support drives with a less spectacular capacity of fourteen to twenty terabytes.