Posted on Wednesday, November 06 2019 @ 16:25 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Speaking to financial analysts during the company's fiscal first quarter earnings call, Seagate CEO Dave Mosley
shed some light about when we can expect higher-capacity hard disk drives. Mosley said the first 18TB HDDs will ship in the first half of 2020, while 20TB models with HAMR technology will follow towards the end of 2020. The 20TB model also uses SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording), which is not a great option if you desire performance. Presumably, these disks will initially be for the enterprise market.
Today, Seagate is the only company mass producing 16-terabyte drives, which are the capacity benchmark for the industry. We are preparing to ship 18-terabyte drives in the first half of calendar year 2020 to maintain our industry capacity leadership. We are also driving areal density leadership with our revolutionary HAMR technology, which enables Seagate to achieve at least 20% areal density CAGR over the next decade. We remain on track to ship 20-terabyte HAMR drives in late calendar year 2020.
A 16TB HDD currently costs about $417.89 on Amazon. Seagate currently expects it will be able to manufacture 50TB HAMR-based HDDs in 2026.
