Backside line: New AI startups are popping up on a regular basis, which suggests demand for information facilities is surging. With Seagate aiming to ship its first million HAMR drives in the course of the first half of 2024 and volumes anticipated to soar thereafter, its partnership with Sony would possibly produce the answer to ever-growing information woes.
Seagate has partnered with Sony Group to supply cutting-edge laser diodes for his or her next-gen HAMR (Warmth-Assisted Magnetic Recording) write heads, with the latter set to kick off manufacturing in Could.
The transfer means that Seagate is not placing all its eggs in a single basket when sourcing these essential elements. By bringing Sony into the combo as a secondary provider, the corporate is guaranteeing a gentle circulate of laser diodes for its upcoming 3.5-inch laborious drives – drives which are poised to supply a staggering 30+ terabytes of storage capability.
However what precisely is enabling this huge leap in information density? The reply lies in Sony’s semiconductor prowess. Its laser diodes boast unimaginable precision, permitting lasers to be targeted on spots only one millionth of a millimeter vast. By firing these high-intensity beams on the drive’s storage floor, the HAMR expertise can successfully double the quantity of information that may be crammed onto every tiny space.
To make this occur, Sony is investing massive bucks – round $33 million – into upgrading their manufacturing with a plant in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture and a manufacturing unit in Thailand, in response to a Nikkei report.
And the timing could not be higher. With the speedy development of AI and data-hungry functions, the demand for cloud storage and information facilities is skyrocketing. Statista, a German analytics agency, predicts that world information technology will hit a staggering 181 zettabytes (that is 21 zeroes in bytes) by 2025 – a 90% soar from 2022.
This insatiable urge for food for information is placing immense strain on information heart operators to increase their infrastructure. However with land and energy constraints, merely constructing extra services is not a sustainable answer. That is the place Seagate and Sony’s collaboration comes into play, providing a technique to double storage density whereas slashing energy consumption by a hefty 40%.
The event follows Seagate’s announcement from January that these drives will probably be out there in mass portions by the tip of this quarter, following the completion of buyer evaluations. The models will primarily goal hyperscale cloud information facilities and bulk storage functions.
If Seagate can efficiently ramp up manufacturing, the following step could be reaching 4TB per platter, probably paving the best way for 40TB HDDs throughout the subsequent two-year interval. Wanting additional forward, Seagate’s preliminary roadmaps have an bold goal of growing 100TB drives by 2030.
