Seagate is going to make it easier for data hoarders to consolidate their content this year with the release of new, massive hard drives for the consumer market. As stated by Seagate CEO Dave Mosley during an earnings call this week, Seagate will be offering 20 TB hard drives in the second half of this calendar year. These drives will feature perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technologies rather than heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), the latter of which allows for data writes to smaller regions by heating disk material with a laser diode. Seagate already offers 20 TB HAMR hard drives, but they are targeted toward business customers.
We’ve leveraged our areal density gains to streamline our product road map, making us better able to meet changing customer demand requirements while maintaining an attractive cost profile. We also leveraged the strength of our common mass capacity platform to execute our 18 terabyte RAM plans to meet customer demand. We expect to begin shipping 20 terabyte PMR drives in the second half of this calendar year.
Source: Seeking Alpha (via Tom’s Hardware)