Seagate Technology has partnered with Sony to produce advanced hard drives. Known for its expertise in producing laser diodes, Sony will produce nanophotonic lasers for Seagate for recording heads, which are needed to further increase the capacity of drives.
At the beginning of 2024, Seagate Technology introduced the new HDD Mozaic 3+ platform and the first 30 TB drives based on it. The design is based on heated magnetic recording or HAMR. To do this, a laser diode is built into the recording head, which heats a magnetic grain with a diameter of 35 nm to 400 °C at the time of recording. Traditionally, magnetic heads for Seagate were developed by TDK. Now, as it turns out, Sony will also take an active part in this.
According to Japanese sources, Sony’s Semiconductor Solutions division will begin production of specialized laser diodes in May. To do this, the company will invest a total of about 5 billion yen ($33 million) in a plant in Miyagi Prefecture, in the north of Japan’s main island, and a factory in Thailand where new production lines will be installed. Thanks to the new diodes, Seagate intends to quickly increase production of hard drives with capacities of 30 TB and larger as technology improves.
The expansion of generative artificial intelligence offerings is rapidly increasing demand for data centers, analysts say. German research company Statista, for example, estimates that global data production will be at least 181 Zbytes in 2025, up 90% from 2022. In fact, the problem here is not a lack of hard drives, but the need for land, buildings and energy sources, but that’s another story.
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