Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording – the long journey from basic research to full scale product ramp

Heat assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, is the next generation magnetic recording technology. Critical components of this technology, such as the plasmonic near field transducer and high anisotropy granular FePt media, as well as recording demonstrations with areal densities exceeding those of any other magnetic recording technology have been described in detail in the literature. At the end of 2020 Seagate demonstrated what at the time were the largest capacity enterprise class hard disk drives with total capacities of 20TB using HAMR technology. Since then, the component and drive technologies have been further developed and matured, all manufacturing systems have been upgraded for a full-scale production ramp, and 30TB drives fulfilling enterprise class performance and reliability specifications are shipping to many key customers. Based on the experience gained from these first two generations of drives we are now working towards the next generations of enterprise class HAMR drive products. In this presentation we will describe the status of HAMR components such as recording heads and media, future developments, remaining challenges, and ultimate physical limits of HAMR technology.