Seagate's Blockbuster Plan: 100 Terabyte Hard Drives Before Decade's End
Seagate will be hawking an absolutely ginormous life raft. The giant US storage firm has announced blockbuster plans to manufacture hard drives capable of holding 100 terabytes. And here's the happy news? They're hoping to have these mega drives in our hands before the end of this decade.
This isn't all about big numbers; this is a strategy play. Seagate is taking up a prominent spot in the booming artificial intelligence marketplace, which of course depends on massive amounts of data. Imagine all that information used to teach those smart AI systems – that's where those enormous-sized drives come in.
How Are They Going to Pull This Off?
Seagate's largest drive today is the Exos M model, which tops out at 36TB. So, to bound ahead to 100TB is a significant jump. The company is spending money on new technology to make it happen. Perhaps the most crucial innovation is HAMR, or Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. It has a sneaky trick of utilizing a tiny laser diode to help pack more data onto the drive platters.
Aside from raw capacity, Seagate is also looking at efficiency. They're engineering hard drives to leverage an NVMe interface, a kind of connection traditionally found in blindingly-fast SSDs. In this case, they're looking to push power efficiency, especially in those massive data centers with thousands of drives.
Seagate: The "AI Company" and a Greener Future?
It's interesting to see Seagate calling itself an "AI company." This is actually a vote of confidence for their commitment to a market that's growing wider and wider. They're unequivocal in believing that even while we're headed toward 2025 and the subsequent years, old-fashioned hard drives remain the safest bet when it comes to preserving massive amounts of data long term.
And it's not just a performance and capacity issue. Seagate also says it's also working on making its storage devices less power-hungry. And also, they're going to shift their manufacturing plants on alternative energy sources so that they can minimize their impact on the earth. Wonderful to see a technology leader considering sustainability and innovation simultaneously.
So, while we won't be seeing 100TB drives on store shelves next week, the cogs are definitely turning. It's an exciting time for data storage, especially as the AI revolution demands increasingly big capacity.
