Seagate unveiled its brand-new Mozaic3+ storage platform earlier this year, leveraging over a decade of research in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology.
By harnessing the world's most sophisticated nanoscale recording techniques and materials science, it has successfully broken free from the constraints of single-disk capacity, surpassing 3TB for the first time (with individual disk capacity exceeding 30TB for the first time), with future projections aiming to exceed 5TB.
The introduction of this new technology and product has sparked various discussions, including controversies and doubts, regarding its reliability and stability.
Seagate has gone to great lengths to disclose a plethora of details, demonstrating that HAMR drives are just as reliable as traditional ones, if not more so.
According to Seagate, the average time between failures for HAMR drives is 250 hours, identical to the current Exos Galaxy series enterprise drives.
These new drives adhere to the same quality assurance specifications, with over 95% of the technology being consistent with existing flagship products, meeting Seagate's standard specifications for hard drives.
Seagate has conducted over 500,000 tests on HAMR drives, following the traditional testing procedures for PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) hard drives while adding specific tests related to HAMR.
Stringent real-world application stress tests have confirmed that the lifespan of HAMR drive heads exceeds seven years, surpassing that of PMR drives and most customers' expectations of four to five years.
Moreover, tests involving thousands of read/write heads have shown that HAMR drives can transfer data for over 6,000 hours, equivalent to a single head transferring 3.2 petabytes, which is more than 20 times that of ordinary near-line drives.
Seagate also revealed that the transition from PMR to HAMR is seamless, with no changes in form factor, enterprise-grade specifications, or warranties. It is fully backward compatible, allowing for plug-and-play use and significant reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO).
To develop HAMR technology and drives, Seagate has invested over $2 billion.
