Seagate is preparing to release its first HAMR hard drive

It's been more than two decades since Seagate first started working on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), and now it may finally be ready to release a hard drive that uses the technology. A new product page spotted by Tom's Hardware shows off the Exos M hard drive with up to 32TB of storage, using Seagate's Mozaic 3 Plus HAMR platform.

Seagate's Mozaic 3 Plus technology enables higher hard drive performance by making the data bits on each disk smaller and closer together. To write data, a laser diode attached to the disk's write heads heats up small areas of the disk. "Each bit heats up and cools down in a nanosecond, so the HAMR laser has no effect on the temperature of the disk or the temperature, stability, or reliability of the media in general," Seagate writes on its website.

Seagate says the Exos M drive has a density of 3TB per platter, making it useful for enterprise applications such as powering artificial intelligence systems. As Tom's Guide points out, Seagate said earlier this month that it had "successfully completed qualification testing" for its HAMR drives with "multiple customers in the mass-capacity market, including a leading cloud service provider." The company says it will begin shipping its HAMR-based drive to an unnamed cloud service provider in the "coming weeks."

Seagate isn't the only company working on high-performance hard drives. Western Digital introduced a 32TB hard drive using energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) in October, and Toshiba recently introduced high-performance hard drives using HAMR and microwave magnetic recording (MAMR).