Hard drives are not dead, Seagate is clear about that and is working on technologies that allow it to offer drives with capacities up to 120TB, a spectacular figure that is even more impressive when given a bit of context, which is that today most PC users have an average storage capacity between 1 and 2 TB. That means we’re talking about 120 times more capacity.

It’s impressive, but it’s a goal as ambitious as it is complicated, and it requires a deep phase of development, which is exactly what Seagate is immersed in right now. The company achieved significant success with the presentation of its platform Mosaic 3+ based on HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) to achieve 30TB hard drive capacity and now aims to quadruple that number.

To achieve this, the company is partnering with Sony create new typeheads keeping the HAMR technology as the basis. In a new report published by researchers from Seagate, NIMS and Tohoku University, we could see very interesting details of the technology that could serve as the basis for Seagate to develop everything it needs to create 120 TB hard drives.

In short, the most important keys on a technological level are in the use of new HAMR heads that would work with the configuration without problems multilayer magnetic plates. Thus, it would be possible to record bits in multiple layers on the same magnetic medium, greatly improving the storage density and increasing the total storage capacity up to 120 TB on a single hard drive.

Why do we need 120TB hard drives?

It is clear that the average user does not need a hard disk with such a capacity, but lThe transformation the technology industry is experiencing It is the one that triggers the storage needs. It is true that a hard drive does not have the same level of performance as an SSD, it is much slower and has other important drawbacks such as high latency, but these types of drives are still the best solution for storing large amounts of data.

with the growth of artificial intelligence and development increasingly large language models Storage needs will only grow, and this is where 120TB hard drives make sense, as a solution for companies and tech giants that need to keep massive amounts of data cold and who can afford to pay the huge price tag these types of storage units will come with.

The use of multilayer patterns is nothing new, but when we talk about magnetic media, it appears as something very complicated to put into practice. In this case, the solution is proposed by researchers use two nanogranular FePt-C films separated by a Ru-C layer with a cubic crystal structure. Thanks to the magnetic field and temperature adjustment process that occurs in HAMR heads, both layers can reliably store different bits in the same vertical space.

The first tests that were carried out in the laboratory They had success and have shown that these advances can be seamlessly integrated into traditional hard drive packaging. All in all, we need to be clear that it is still in the early stages and that it will be many years before we see 120TB hard drives in stores.