We’re here at Seagate’s CES 2018 booth visiting the Datasphere Labs. We’re in the technology zone where innovations come to life, including Seagate’s HAMR data-density boosting technology, and Seagate’s MACH.2 Multi Actuator — the world’s first dual actuator hard drive technology.
Watch this short video to see Jason Feist, Seagate’s director of Enterprise Product Planning, showing our fun Data Games demos of these advanced technologies coming from Seagate’s scientists and engineers. Then scroll down below to see our HAMR and MACH.2 dual actuator hard drive illustrations, which CES visitors can holographically interact with.
To grow capacity, we need to make data bits smaller and smaller
“As we continue to grow capacity, we need to make sure we have the ability to make data bits smaller and smaller over time,” explains says Feist. “With that, we need to create a technology that enables that capacity growth.”
“In order to do that, we need heat and media and head technology to come together and allow that density growth: HAMR – heat-assisted magnetic recording,” Feist explains.
As the Data Age emerges, the insatiable hunger for greater storage capacity is accelerating at an astronomical rate, and our advanced engineering team has developed HAMR to address the next stage in higher capacities.
In our Datasphere Labs CES experience zone Seagate is showcasing our proprietary execution of HAMR technology, which enables higher capacity per hard drive platter, and reduces total cost of ownership by getting a lot more terabytes (TB) into standard drive form factor.
Attendees will experience the “coolest” most innovative heat-assisted technology in the world — conceptually through a hologram as you can see in the video above, and physically through a hands-on demo too — and they can get a shareable video of their firsthand interaction with HAMR technology via email.
“We’ve created a HAMR demo that uses functioning HAMR drives,” Feist says, “showing that we can record video of the people we’re interacting with here at CES, while playing it back to them on those same HAMR devices.”
Learn more about how our HAMR technology is rolling out here.
Faster performance: MACH.2 dual actuator HDD unlocks data’s potential
But capacity is only half of the solution. If the speed we can access all that data doesn’t keep pace with all that capacity, the value created by data will be inhibited. Therefore, two sides to the advancement of digital storage are necessary: increased capacity and increased performance.
In terms of performance, consider what happens when data cannot be accessed quickly due to massive data capacity. Usability suffers, which is a nightmare for IT decision-makers and channel buyers, data center architects and administrators, system integrators and builders, storage analysts, and tech enthusiasts alike.
Seagate is solving the concurrent need for increased performance with parallelism of data flows in and out of the drive by introducing our new MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology into our first-generation dual actuator HDDs, which offsets the usability issues that arise with higher capacities, and doubles hard drive IOPS performance.
Learn more about how our Multi Actuator technology works here.
Really cool video-game holograph implementation
“We’ve also created a really cool video-game holograph implementation, showing ‘What is HAMR’ and ‘What is Multi Actuator,’ so that the user can interact with, and manipulate, and visually see how these technologies work,” Feist says.
Get a closer look here at the 3D interactive tech illustrations our visitors can explore and manipulate at our CES 2018 Datasphere Labs:
An up-close look at where the laser fits in on a HAMR drive:
Just how small is a data track on a HAMR drive? Smaller than you think:
Seagate’s unique new MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology:
Together, HAMR and MACH.2 Multi Actuator hard drive technologies provide the future of capacity and performance Hyperscale data centers require. These technologies are being implemented in the near future in Seagate Exos enterprise hard drives.
