Seagate is pouring another £100 million into its Northern Ireland nano-photonics operation as it bets on hard drives playing a key role in AI datacenters well into the next decade.
The HDD giant will invest £115 million in total in the Derry facility over the next five years, £15 million of which will come from the region’s economic development agency, Invest NI.
Seagate has been in Derry for over 30 years, with the focus recently being on developing and manufacturing the lasers used in the recording heads of the vendor’s Mozaic disk drives.
Seagate CTO John Morris told Blocks & Files, “The Nano photonics coming from this site is aligned with future product launches and in the Mozaic +4+ plus time frame … but more importantly, it’s a foundation for all of the downstream Mozaic platforms that we will launch into production over time.”
He said the current project was, ”Specifically targeting technology that would deliver at least six terabytes per disk and play a significant role in our path to get to 10 terabytes per disk that we announced earlier this year.”
The 3+ etc nomenclature refers to the number of TBs per disk, or platter, with Seagate currently able to integrate up to 10 drives into a single drive unit, Morris said.
Back in May, Seagate said it expected to deliver a 100 TB drive in around 2032. As Morris explained today, “As you might imagine, projecting out seven years has a degree of uncertainty in it.”
The laser components are just one of multiple critical parts needed to deliver higher capacity drives, he said. “There’s a wave guide and there’s a plasmonic transducer that converts the energy from the laser into energy that we can efficiently exchange in the media to support the writing process.”
“The smaller we can make the features, he continued, “the smaller we can engineer the critical features, mainly in the plasmonic antenna, the higher capacity we can support in a disk drive. And so this is a race to miniaturize everything at the nanometer scale.”
The firm said this effort is, at least in part, to meet the demand for data driven by hyperscale data centres and the AI data boom.
Bursting into tiers
The popular view is that it is SSDs that are key to providing storage in AI datacentres, both from a performance and a thermal point of view.
Morris agreed that, “In the case of AI, you have GPUs, tightly coupled to that you have HBM memory. The next tier out tends to be flash. And for compute intensive work, the bulk of the data path is across those memories and storage.”
But, he continued, the next tier of storage was focused on very large datasets, such as exabyte scale data lakes, taht are only ging to get bigger. “That tier of storage tends to be 90 plus percent disk drive, and the balance is flash, and it provides a tier that makes it easy to get data in and out of the very large data lake.”
Given that there was a five and 10 to one cost advantage byte for byte in HDD’s favour and this was unlikely to change over the next decade, he said, “It’s just a question of economics, providing you know that exabyte scale data lake requires the superior economics of disk drives to make it work.” Though, it has to be said, not everyone agrees.
Certainly someone is keen to buy up traditional drives. Seagate’s most recent results showed full year turnover up 39 percent to $9.1bn, with net profit of $1.47, up from $335m the previous year, driven by sales of the HAMR line to cloud service providers.
CEO, and now chairman, Dave Mosley said at the time that the growth of edge datacentres and the drive for data sovereignty boded well for demand for mass capacity hard drives well into the future.
