The expansion of solid state drives in the consumer sector does not diminish the importance of advancing technology for the production of hard drives on magnetic platters. In the foreseeable future, they will lead in terms of price-to-volume ratio, but they will concentrate mainly on data storage systems. Seagate expects to surpass 120 TB in a single drive early in the next decade.

Image source: Seagate Technology

At the end of February, Seagate Technology held a virtual conference for analysts and investors, refreshing its long-term roadmap for developing its own technologies for manufacturing magnetic hard drives. If we talk about the materials from which magnetic plates are made, then by the end of the decade they will have achieved such a degree of ordering of particles that will increase the recording density to 8 TB per square inch. In other words, by 2030, one magnetic plate will be able to hold up to 10 TB of information. This will pave the way for 100TB hard drives, and Seagate expects to hit the 120TB mark in the next decade.

Image source: Seagate Technology

Seagate’s current perpendicular particle recording technology is not going to be abandoned – this year it will create a 20 TB hard drive, but in the future the company intends to rely on laser heated plate recording (HAMR) technology. Prototypes of hard drives with HAMR technology have been around for a couple of years, they debuted in 14 TB models, but it is this technology that will allow Seagate to step over the 20 TB milestone in the production of serial hard drives. In fact, the company’s customers are already using prototype hard drives with HAMR technology in tens of thousands of copies, and they are completely satisfied with it. In the coming years, HAMR will enable Seagate to grow its hard drive capacity by 20% annually.

Image source: Seagate Technology

Seagate hard drives with a capacity of 30 TB should appear no earlier than 2023, by that time they will be equipped with two sets of magnetic heads and actuators, which will more than double the speed of information transfer. Until then, Seagate has no plans to offer hard drives with two sets of actuators en masse.

Image source: Seagate Technology

The 50 TB milestone will be crossed by 2026, although a couple of years ago Seagate was convinced that it could do it by the middle of the decade. In 2025, according to the manufacturer’s forecasts, it will receive up to 90% of the revenue from the sale of hard drives used in cloud storage systems and the server segment. Client devices will account for no more than 10% of the revenue.