Seagate Ships 16 TB PMR Hard Drives, Preps 18 TB SMR HDDs
 

Continuing the march of progress in the HDD industry, Seagate has revealed that they have started shipping their 16 TB PMR hard drives. In a quarterly earnings call last week, the company reported that the drives have been shipping since late March, with current shipments coming ahead of high volume production of the drives. Seagate in turn expects to kick off mass production in the second half of 2019, and by Q2 2020 the new 16 TB drives will be its highest revenue SKU. What is particularly noteworthy here, besides the capacity of course, is that these drives do not use next-generation heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Instead, they're based around more contemporary perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), which is being boosted by two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14297...18-tb-smr-hdds