“Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) - next generation hard disk drive technology”

Magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) store over 90% of the world’s digital data enabling the internet and economical access to data to power everything from social media to self-driving cars.  Heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is being developed as the next recording technology for HDDs. HAMR will bring profound changes to the HDD components and architecture. Critical components of this technology, such as the plasmonic near field transducer and high anisotropy granular FePt media, as well as recording demonstrations and fully integrated drives have been reported. One of the ongoing challenges of magnetic recording in general and HAMR in particular has been the demonstration of high linear density recording approaching the grain-size limit of the recording media, and a clear pathway to smaller grain sizes while maintaining good magnetic properties and distributions. In this presentation we will demonstrate the extensibility of FePt-based media, and using a head with high thermal gradient we will show a high linear recording density approaching the grain size limit of the media. Assuming continued progress in growth, microstructure and architecture of the media stack and the head architecture, and based on simplistic geometrical scaling, these demonstrations provide visibility out to the 3-4 Tb/in² areal density range, enabling high capacity HAMR HDDs that will serve the demand for future economical storage solutions for the world’s ever growing data. As announced in a recent blog (http://blog.seagate.com/intelligent/hamr-next-leap-forward-now/), Seagate is now shipping HAMR units to select customers for integration tests, and will start shipping commercial HAMR products to key customers by the end of 2018, with full-scale mass production of industry leading high-capacity drives slated for 2020.