Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)
An HDD technology that briefly heats the media with a laser so bits can be written on high-coercivity material at higher density.
HAMR addresses the writeability/thermal-stability trade-off at high areal density: media grains are made highly coercive so tiny bits stay stable at room temperature, then a laser diode on the write head briefly heats a nanoscale spot so the magnetic writer can flip polarity; the spot cools in about a nanosecond. Seagate’s shipping Mozaic platform pairs superlattice high-anisotropy media with a plasmonic (near-field) writer. HAMR changes how small bits are written, not whether tracks are shingled—Mozaic SKUs appear in vendor CMR/SMR matrices as CMR or SMR variants. It targets mass-capacity nearline density; seek and rotational latency remain mechanical. Public production emphasis has been Seagate; other vendors discuss HAMR on their own qualification timelines.
Relations
- related
- mamr, pmr, nearline-hdd, helium-hdd
Advantages
- Extends areal density beyond PMR alone by using thermally assisted writes.