A few days ago, Toshiba (the third HDD manufacturer after Western Digital and Seagate Technology) announced that it will have HDDs with storage capacities of over 30TB with both HAMR and MAMR energy assisted magnetic recording technologies. Toshiba said that it had achieved 32TB on 10 disks using HAMR and shingled magnetic recording (SMR). The company said that it would start shipping test sample HDDs with HAMR technology in 2025.
Toshiba also said that it is using microwave assisted magnetic recording, otherwise known as MAMR to achieve 31TB with 11 disks, SMR and improved signal processing. Toshiba said that its first MAMR drives have been in mass production since 2021. The Toshiba HAMR and MAMR HDDs used magnetic media from Resonac Corporation (formerly known as Showa Denko) and magnetic heads from TDK Corporation. Toshiba has no internal media or head production.
Seagate announced that it was introducing 30+TB HDDs for enterprise and data center applications in 2022 and has been working on qualification of these drives through 2023 and into 2024 with production volume of commercial drives starting after June 2024.
Seagate said that they expected to ship a few hundred thousand HAMR-based HDDs in the June quarter to a hyperscale customers and the company said it completed a qualification of HAMR drives with a non-cloud customer as well. Volume shipments of HAMR nearline HDDs from Seagate should start to ramp in the second half of 2024.
With Seagate initially shipping HAMR test samples in 2022 and with volume production planned in the second half of 2024, Toshiba’s announcements would seem to put its introduction of HAMR HDDs about two years behind Seagate. If this is so, then by 2026 both Seagate and Toshiba will be mass producing HAMR HDDs with 32+TB capacities. Note that Seagate has said that they should be shipping 40+TB HDDs by 2026.
The figure below shows the HDD market share in C1Q 2024. Toshiba market share in C4Q 2023 and C1Q 2024 was about 22%.
If this market share is similar in 2026 then perhaps over half of the HDDs shipped could use HAMR technology. How much higher this percentage might get depends upon what Western Digital does with HAMR technology. WDC has not revealed its plans for introduction of HAMR HDDs. Its latest HDD announcements were for products using its e-PMR, UltraSMR and OptiNAND products.
However, TDK and Resonac have a history of selling heads and media to Seagate and Western Digital in the past. WDC could kickstart its HAMR drive introduction initially using heads from TDK and disks from Resonac. This happened for some past technology transitions. The continued existence of these two independent head and media component suppliers, who also support Toshiba, have made it possible for WDC to pursue a rapid follower strategy for new product introductions.
Considering Toshiba’s announcement and past HDD industry history, I suspect that by 2026 and no later than 2027, all three HDD manufacturers will be producing HAMR HDDs in volume. With more than half of shipping HDDs using HAMR technologies will enable continuing areal density increases that keep the HDD price per TB less that SSDs for nearline storage applications.
