One last hurray for conventional hard drive technology at Seagate: The company has developed its last hard drive with Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). It comes first as the Exos X24, which appears with the highest capacity to date – 24 TB. While the Exos X24 is primarily intended for (cloud) data centers, Seagate also appears to be launching an identical sister model under the Ironwolf Pro NAS series. There is already a corresponding but overpriced shop listing (from €1160).
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In the Exos X24 24 TB There are ten data disks (platters) each with a capacity of 2.4 TB, with a rotation speed of 7200 revolutions per minute. The 3.5-inch case is sealed and filled with helium. Seagate offers the hard drive with both SATA and SAS connections. It should achieve sequential transfer rates of up to 285 MB/s.
Seagate is currently sending the Exos X24 24 TB to partners for qualification. The model will be more widely available from December 2023. The manufacturer also wants to offer certain partners a 28 TB version in which the data tracks overlap (Shingled Magnetic Recording, SMR). This allows capacity to be increased, but SMR HDDs are slow to rewrite.
Switch to HAMR
Seagate’s production of the first hard drives with Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) will begin in early 2024. A laser in the write head heats the magnetic particles shortly before writing to a temperature just below the Curie point. This makes magnetization much easier because the necessary magnetic field strength decreases – and the write head can be smaller and thus magnetize a smaller point; more smaller dots lead to a higher area density.
The first generation comes with a capacity of 32 TB. Internally, Seagate is already testing models with up to 50 TB, but these are still a long time coming. Unlike Seagate, competitors Western Digital (WD) and Toshiba rely on Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR). A microwave transmitter in the head increases the writing performance, which enables narrower data tracks.
(mma)