Surprising 32TB hard drive uses a laser to heat the panel in nanosecond units for cooling.

Samsung had finally put in the effort to provide the largest hard drive up until then. This was made possible through technology that uses a laser to heat and cool an extremely small part of the flat surface for nanoseconds, allowing a single 32TB hard drive to be manufactured.

Seagate has been researching based on thermal storage magnetic recording (HAMR) technology for 17 years, and announced last year that they had finally solved it. The Mozaic 3+ 32TB drive is now beginning mass production and preparing for release.

The company explains the problem they are trying to solve with disk platters:

To increase hard drive capacity, engineers want to put more data bits, or "grains," into each disk platter. They increase the density of compressed bits within each square area on the surface. With more bits on the disk, you can store more data.

However, as bit density increases, they get closer together and may affect the magnetic direction of adjacent decision makers. Normally, the stability ("thermal stability") of each decision maker at room temperature becomes an issue; the only solution is to manufacture disk platters using new materials with higher thermal stability so that decision makers do not affect each other.

This solution is effective. It makes each bit very stable in operation at room temperature, but a second problem arises: how can you change the magnetic direction of an extremely stable bit at any time? How can you record new data on a highly thermally stable cell with a laser?

The company explains that their solution is to temporarily heat up microscopic sections of the disk only enough to allow one data bit to be written, creating sufficient volatility. This HAMR approach was proposed in 2007 and has been continuously researched since then.

To write new data, a small laser diode connected to each recording head instantly opens up at a very small point on the disk, allowing the recording head to flip the magnetic polarity of one bit at a time to write data. Each bit heats up and cools down for nanoseconds, so an HAMR laser does not affect drive temperature or media stability or reliability.

Seagate successfully produced HAMR drives last year and has been providing them to some select customers since then. The Mozaic 3+ is now entering mass production.

The Times Hardware reported that Western Digital was using a similar technology called energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) to provide their 32TB drive, which heats up the panel but uses electricity instead of a laser.

Currently, drives are targeted at enterprise customers for use in data centers, but like all storage technologies, they are expected to spread to consumer products over time.

Image: Seagate