Intevac is a manufacturer of thin film handling systems disclosed The company has received an order from another customer for a machine to process magnetic films for HAMR media. Intevac has not revealed which company will deploy the drives, but logic suggests Toshiba or Western Digital Preparing to start production based on Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology.
has received its order HAMR upgrade of its Lean 200 platform Driven by its second major customer, Intevac now expects its HDD division to generate approximately $200 million in revenue over the next three years, driven by widespread adoption of HAMR technology. The company anticipates demand for high-capacity hard drives in the data center and artificial intelligence industries.
Seagateof Mozaic 3+ HAMR based HDD Use a glass disk coated with a magnetic film, such as iron-platinum alloy (FePt). The data is recorded by using a laser to heat the magnetic film to the Curie temperature (the point at which magnetism changes) and reduce its coercive force. Because the magnetic coating of HAMR media is different from that of perpendicular magnetic recording media, Intervac’s Lean 200 tool for processing the film had to be upgraded.
Apparently Toshiba or Western Digital had ordered such an upgrade, and the initial upgrade installation was completed successfully. Both companies have HAMR drives on their roadmaps.
Currently, Toshiba uses FC-MAMR (Flux Control – Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology in its MG series HDDs with capacities up to 24TB. The company intends to adopt MAS-MAMR (Microwave-Assisted Switching – Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) in its next-generation 26TB-30TB capacity HDDs. After that, the company plans to adopt HAMR, which will be implemented on 35TB hard drives. However, it’s not entirely clear when this will happen, as the company is working on an HDD roadmap for a 2022 release.
As for Western Digital, it did announce in mid-2023 that its HAMR-based hard drives would enter mass production within 1.5 years. This year, the company started sampling its 32TB Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) HDD and will begin mass production in 2025. It’s time for the company to start preparing the equipment to produce HAMR hard drives.