The global datacenter electricity consumption is expected to double to 1,065TWh by 2030 from the 1,065TWh in 2025—accounting for 3.7% of the world’s energy use—driven by the continuing growth of power-intensive generative AI (GenAI) training and inference applications, according to a report by Deloitte.

As the world grapples with reining in carbon emission in line with the goal of Net Zero, the onus falls on technology companies to develop and implement datacenter technologies that will further improve efficiency and promote sustainability.

A global leader in mass-capacity data storage, Seagate launched Mozaic 3+ last year—a state-of-the-art hard drive platform that incorporates the company’s Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology.

The technology heralds unparalleled areal densities of up to 3.6TB per platter—and a roadmap that will achieve 4TB+ and 5TB+ per platter in the coming years. Seagate was able to achieve this trailblazing feat by developing key innovations, including a superlattice platinum-alloy media, a plasmonic writer, Seagate’s gen 7 spintronic reader, and an in-house-developed 12nm integrated controller.

In the Mozaic 3+ hard drives, Seagate an iron-platinum superlattice structure in the media alloy, significantly increasing the magnetic coercivity of disk media. This allows for precise data writing and unprecedented bit stability. However, the media are made magnetically “harder” to prevent instability, necessitating a revolutionary writer. Anchoring this technology is a nanophotonic laser, which produces an infinitesimal heat spot on the media surface to reliably write the data.

Another development is the Gen 7 spintronic reader. Incorporating quantum technology, Seagate has built the industry’s smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors in Mozaic-enabled drives to facilitate higher data densities. Finally, Seagate has developed entirely in-house a 12nm system-on-a-chip (SoC) that can deliver up to 3x the performance compared to prior processors.

Industry recognition

All of these innovations are what contributed to Seagate’s receiving an Innovation R&D Award at the recent EE Awards Asia 2024, held last December in Taipei. Now on its fifth year, EE Awards Asia celebrates the outstanding achievements and honor the innovators behind the electronics and semiconductor sector in Asia.

“We are extremely proud of our current achievement,” says Thomas Chang, Sr. Director of Advanced Development at Seagate. “For storage—the main motivation for technology advancements has been to continue to scale or reduce the size of the recording at a disk-level. Right now, we are at the crossroads where the previous technology, which is called perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), has basically run out of gas. We are not able to physically scale the information any further.”

According to Chang, the most remarkable aspect about the new technology from a user perspective is that, while it may look indistinguishable at the device level, the significant difference lies in the increased density in a platter. “What makes it unique in the market is that we were the first to transition into this new technology and make it available for consumers. This allows us to pack more information into the same device without adding additional components,” says Chang.

The Mozaic 3+ platform enables storage capacity expansion using roughly the same material components as PMR hard drives—and that is the key innovation, according to Chang. He notes while the industry is still relying on legacy technology, it hits a threshold where they can only increase the capacity of a device by adding more discs. “This approach adds cost to the drive and increases power consumption, but the performance does not improve accordingly,” he explains.

Because of areal density innovations, Mozaic 3+ addresses challenges data centers face: scale up, scale out, or migrate to cloud. Mozaic enables 300% or more storage capacity in same footprint and significantly lowers storage acquisition and operational costs, which is a 25% or more cost reduction per TB . The HAMR-based platform also helps customers achieve sustainability goals—a top priority for large-scale data centers—by offering a 55% reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte (when comparing a 30TB Mozaic 3+-enabled Exos M drive with am Exos X 10TB PMR-powered drive).

“Receiving the Innovation R&D Award is an honor, and we are deeply grateful for this significant recognition,” says Chang. “What makes this award even more noteworthy is that it celebrates innovation. I want to express my gratitude for recognizing our technology, as it is very challenging for those outside to fully grasp the extensive technical innovation involved in this transition. We have developed a groundbreaking medium, and there has been substantial innovation in the recording head, the optical delivery system, and the conventional magnetic writer. Integrating all these elements into this tiny slider and then into a drive is a remarkable achievement. Innovations are everywhere, but they do not happen very often. I have observed the development of HAMR for about 20 years. This innovation has been a long time coming.”

Future technologies

Seagate is a technology company, and as such, its future depends on continued investments in  R&D of future concepts.

“But beyond HAMR, which is Mozaic 3+ technology, the industry is exploring multi-level recording. Instead of scaling the size of the recorded bit, which has two levels of information  (zero and one), we aim to increase logic level so that each bit has multiple levels of information. The hard disk drive industry follows a common roadmap through various consortiums, and we are all working towards this goal. It depends on how much investment we are willing to put in to overcome some of the challenges and implement it in production.

Chang says the industry is also looking into all-optical switching. “We use ultra-fast optics to provide deterministic switching of the recorded information,” he says. “I was involved for a couple of years in DNA storage, where information is recorded in a DNA string, although that is still in work. We have a pipeline of active research areas, working with various universities to lay the foundation for future advancements. This is always what makes it exciting to work here.”