America’s leading data storage company, Seagate has revealed that they have started shipping 16 TB CMR hard drives since late March and the shipment has reached up to a high volume production by April end. Seagate has forecasted to break the mass production level in the second half of 2019, and they believe that the product would generate tremendous revenue for the company.
The New 16 TB CMR hard drives do not contain next generation heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Instead, the company has used the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) and two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) platters in the 16 TB CMR hard drives. Earlier, Seagate had decided to ship 16 TB hard drives with conventional HAMR platters, but their customers are receiving back the HAMR based Exos X16 hard drives from users due to some flaws like abnormal hard drive recovery and virus attack. Hence the company took an initiative to produce 16 TB 3.5 Inch helium-filled hard drives with PMR and TDMR platters.
Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate, said, “We are very pleased to announce that we began shipping our 16 TB drives in late March as planned. Qualifications are underway at many major cloud and enterprise customers. We expect to begin ramping to high volume later in calendar 2019 and expect 16 terabyte drives will be our highest revenue SKU by this time next year.”
After shipping the 16 TB CMR hard drives, Seagate is planning to build 18 TB SMR hard drives with the same platters. These hard drives will be essential for users who require higher capacity with the read-intensive workload.
