Seagate Technology has announced the launch of its new Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform, which it says incorporates innovative heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.

The company also reveals that its new data storage platform has unparalleled areal densities of 3TB+ per platter and there are plans to achieve 4TB+ and 5TB+ per platter in the coming years.

The Mozaic 3+ platform additionally powers Seagate’s flagship Exos product range, with newly announced capacity points of 30TB and more.

Increasing data storage capacity

Seagate highlights that the areal density of the hard drive – which increases the number of bits that can be stored on a platter – addresses common industry pain points.

Mozaic 3+ therefore enables customers to store more data in the same floor space than ever before.

Upgrading from a 16TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drive (the average capacity in large-scale data centres) to an Exos 30TB Mozaic 3+ technology drive effectively doubles capacity in the same footprint.

As the data storage platform uses almost the same material components as PMR hard drives while dramatically increasing capacity, it enables data centres to significantly lower storage acquisition and operational costs.

According to the company, Mozaic 3+ can additionally help customers achieve sustainability goals by offering a 55% reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte (when comparing a 30TB Mozaic 3+ drive with a traditional 16TB PMR drive).

“Seagate is the world’s only hard drive manufacturer with the areal density capability to get to 3TB per platter and with 5TB on the horizon,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate’s CEO.

“As artificial intelligence (AI) use cases put a premium on raw data sets, more companies are going to need to store all the data they can.

“To accommodate the resulting masses of data, areal density matters more than ever.”

Key features

Some of the main features of data storage platform highlighted by Seagate are:

1. Superlattice platinum-alloy media: in Mozaic 3+ hard drives, the media alloy uses an iron-platinum superlattice structure, which significantly increases the magnetic coercivity of disk media. This allows for precise data writing and unprecedented bit stability
2. Plasmonic writer: since the media are made magnetically “harder” to prevent instability, the design requires a miniaturized and precise engineered writer. Anchoring this technology is a nanophotonic laser, which produces an infinitesimal heat spot on the media surface to reliably write the data. Seagate plans to vertically integrate the nanophotonic laser into the plasmonic writer sub-system.
3. Gen 7 spintronic reader: incorporating quantum technology, Mozaic 3+ includes one of the world’s smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors
4. 12nm integrated controller: the integrated controller, developed in house, is an application-specific integrated circuit that delivers up to three times the performance compared to prior solutions

In addition to data centres, Mozaic 3+ data storage technology will enable a wide range of use cases, ranging from enterprise, to edge, NAS and video and imaging applications (VIA) ma