Seagate Mozaic 4+: New hard drives with 44 TByte and HAMR technology

Seagate has reached its second generation of modern Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to boost hard drive capacity to up to 44 TByte. Seagate is currently the only manufacturer producing HAMR drives in series, a technology that all hard drive manufacturers consider necessary for drives up to about 100 TByte. With HAMR, the disk surface is heated to a temperature of more than 400 °C shortly before writing to reduce the field strength required for writing. The smaller write heads made possible by this also reduce the area required to store a single bit – the areal density increases, and thus the capacity.

The second HAMR generation, also known as Mosiac 4+, is expected to achieve a capacity of at least 4 TByte per platter, as the name suggests. Since Seagate uses a stack of ten platters per drive, this results in a capacity of at least 40 TByte per drive. This applies to drives with conventional recording (CMR). With Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), i.e., overlapping tracks, Seagate promises a capacity of 44 TByte.

Seagate is thus fulfilling its promise to increase the capacity per hard drive, but not the number of units produced. SSDs and hard drives are currently scarce and expensive, with AI data centers buying virtually every terabyte they can get their hands on.

Even more room to maneuver

In an interview with heise online, Jason Feist, Senior Vice President Products and Markets, revealed further details. The most important innovation of Mosaic 4+ is the complete integration of the laser into the read-write head, which further reduces the necessary component space. This gives engineers more design freedom and allows for better manufacturing integration. Seagate does not intend to use the component space gained through further miniaturization for installing additional platters (WD already has a design with eleven disks on the market, Toshiba has shown one with twelve disks). Seagate thus has further reserves; Feist commented on this only, "Physics is physics," no one can outsmart it, but everyone can push its limits.

Currently, Seagate uses not only the new lasers integrated into the head but also lasers from external suppliers. This allows the company to better respond to demand fluctuations; supply chain security is to be increased. According to Feist, Seagate has made further progress in signal processing: improved signal-to-noise ratios, he states, lead to more stable operation with smaller signals.

Feist did not announce any concrete products yet. However, two hyperscalers have already completed the qualification of the new drives and are already using them. Seagate is supplying SMR models with 44 TByte "in high volumes to two of the leading hyperscalers." Seagate plans broad availability with further ramp-up of production; no date was given. The SMR drives require adapted control, but the 40 TByte CMR models are suitable as a simple replacement for smaller hard drives. Seagate plans to offer not only server hard drives with this capacity but also NAS drives (Ironwolf Pro) and surveillance models for video recording. Exact technical data of the new models are not yet available.

Seagate already aims to bring the next Mosaic generation to production readiness by 2028, Mosaic 5+ is then to enable platters with at least 5 TByte. The company expects 10 TByte disks in 2032 – combined with additional platters, the capacity of a drive could thus be well over 100 TByte.

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