Seagate this week unveiled the first hard drive platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR from heat-assisted media recording).
The new Mozaic 3+ platform is based on several new technologies, including new read and write heads and an all-new controller.
The platform will be used for Seagate's upcoming Exos hard drives in cloud data centers and will have capacities from 30 TB and up.
Heat-assisted magnetic recording is intended to radically increase the local recording density of magnetic media.
Seagate's Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer composed of an iron-platinum superlattice structure that ensures both longevity and a smaller size compared to standard HDD platters.
For recording, the platform uses a plasmonic recording subsystem with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser that heats the media prior to recording.
Seagate introduced the new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the “smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors in the world,” according to the company.
Because Seagate's new Mozaic 3+ platform deals with very small grain size media, a new writer, and a reader that features multiple tiny magnetic field readers, it will require a lot of computing power to orchestrate the drive's work.
Thus, Seagate has equipped the Mozaic 3+ platform with an all-new controller built on a 12 nm manufacturing process.
