Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording – Next Generation Mass Storage Technology

Magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) store over 90% of the world’s digital data enabling the internet and economical access to data to power everything from social media to self-driving cars. Heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is being developed as the next recording system for HDDs. HAMR will bring profound changes to the HDD components and architecture, incorporating laser diodes in an innovative plasmonic light delivery system into the recording heads, and novel nano-magnetic materials and layer architectures in the recording media [1]. Seagate demonstrated the promise of HAMR with a 1 -2 Tb/in
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areal density demonstration [2, 3] and the subsequent demonstration of a fully functional drive with more than 1000 write power-on hours [4, 5]. The significant progresses have been enabled by breakthroughs in media and head technology together with drive integration. With continuing development efforts in reliability and data density HAMR will serve the demand for economical hard disk drive storage solutions for the world’s ever growing data. As announced in a recent blog, Seagate is now shipping HAMR units to select customers for integration tests, and will start shipping commercial HAMR products to key customers by the end of 2018 [6]. This paper will cover the key enablers for HAMR technology to support both high areal density and linear density, which will be critical for bringing a new “S” curve for the magnetic recording industry. It will also be discussed about the challenges and breakthroughs in fundamental magnetic properties for the recording layer and near field optical transducers, to support the extension of HAMR to around 4-5 Tbit/in
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.