Seagate's new Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform based on Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) continues to see increasing shipments. With HAMR utilizing time heating technology in the disks and brand-new read/write heads, it introduces several new changes, leading to doubts about the reliability of this technology. The company is not only shipping its first significant new hard drive technology in a decade but also proving the reliability of this groundbreaking technology over the past ten years.
To address these issues (and further promote its HAMR hard drives), Seagate has released a new blog post outlining the company's research and development efforts, as well as why the company expects the lifespan of its HAMR drives to last for several years - comparable to, or even longer than, the current PMR hard drives.
According to the company, the reliability of the Mozaic 3+ hard drive is comparable to traditional hard drives relying on Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR). In fact, over the past two years, the reliability of HAMR HDD components has increased by 50%. Seagate states that the Mozaic 3+ hard drive boasts impressive durability metrics: its read/write heads have proven capable of handling over 3.2 PB of data transfer within 6000 hours of operation, which is 20 times higher than typical nearline hard drives. Therefore, Seagate rates the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of these hard drives at 2.5 million hours, consistent with PMR-based drives.
Seagate claims that based on their on-site stress tests of over 500,000 Mozaic 3+ hard drives, the lifespan of the Mozaic 3+ hard drive heads will exceed 7 years, surpassing the typical lifespan of current PMR-based drives. Generally, customers expect the average lifespan of modern PMR drives under normal usage conditions to be four to five years, so the lifespan of these drives will exceed current expectations.
Seagate will continue to focus on seamlessly transitioning from PMR drives to HAMR drives in customer systems. This means ensuring that these new drives can adapt to existing data center infrastructures without requiring any changes to enterprise specifications, warranty terms, or physical dimensions.
