Heat-assisted magnetic recording

"HAMR" redirects here. For the titanium production process, see Hydrogen assisted magnesiothermic reduction.

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) (pronounced "hammer") is a magnetic storage technology for greatly increasing the amount of data that can be stored on a magnetic device such as a hard disk drive by temporarily heating the disk material during writing, which makes it much more receptive to magnetic effects and allows writing to much smaller regions (and much higher levels of data on a disk).

The technology was initially seen as extremely difficult to achieve, with doubts expressed about its feasibility in 2013.[1] The regions being written must be heated in a tiny area – small enough that diffraction prevents the use of normal laser focused heating – and requires a heating, writing and cooling cycle of less than 1 nanosecond, while also controlling the effects of repeated spot-heating on the drive platters, the drive-to-head contact, and the adjacent magnetic data which must not be affected. These challenges required the development of nano-scale surface plasmons (surface guided laser) instead of direct laser-based heating, new types of glass platters and heat-control coatings that tolerate rapid spot-heating without affecting the contact with the recording head or nearby data, new methods to mount the heating laser onto the drive head, and a wide range of other technical, development and control issues that needed to be overcome.[2][3]

HAMR's planned successor, known as heated-dot magnetic recording (HDMR), or bit-pattern recording, is also under development, although not expected to be available until at least 2025.[4][5] HAMR drives have the same form factor (size and layout) as existing traditional hard drives, and do not require any change to the computer or other device in which they are installed; they can be used identically to existing hard drives.[6][7] 32 TB HAMR drives were shipped to some customers for qualification in 2023.[8]

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  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Seagate_HAMR_technical was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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  6. ^ Shilov, Anton (23 January 2021). "Seagate Ships 20TB HAMR HDDs Commercially, Increases Shipments of Mach.2 Drives". www.tomshardware.com. Retrieved 26 February 2021.
  7. ^ Lee, Aaron; Tsai, Joseph (15 January 2021). "Seagate to expand HDD storage capacity". www.digitimes.com. Retrieved 26 February 2021.
  8. ^ "Seagate Technology Holdings plc (STX) Presents at Bank of America 2023 Global Technology Conference (Transcript)".