This episode features an interview with Stephanie Hernandez, Senior Engineering Director at Seagate. In this episode, Stephanie discusses the groundbreaking advancements in hard drive technology and the transformative potential of Seagate's Mozaic platform.
This episode features an interview with Stephanie Hernandez, Senior Engineering Director at Seagate. With nearly 20 years of expertise in hard drive technology, Stephanie leads the charge in researching advanced technologies for the next generation of data storage.
Stephanie discusses the groundbreaking advancements in hard drive technology and the transformative potential of Seagate's Mozaic platform. Stephanie provides a deep dive into the development process, the significance of aerial density, and how Mozaic technology is set to revolutionize data storage beyond current limitations.
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Guest Quote
“The industry in general agrees that we need a paradigm shift in hard drive technology in order to keep increasing capacity.”
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Time Stamps
*(02:18) Inside the Mozaic 3+ platform
*(05:17) Understanding aerial density
*(07:01) Scaling capacities beyond 3TB
*(08:47) Paradigm shift in hard drive technology
*(11:43) Seagate's commitment to innovation
*(17:33) AI and machine learning at Seagate
*(18:44) Seagate's culture and values
*(24:45) Focus on sustainability
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Sponsor copy
Writing the Future is brought to you by Seagate. Seagate is at the forefront of storing, protecting, and activating the world's data. With explosive growth in cloud, AI, and machine learning, Seagate delivers breakthrough technology and mass-capacity storage solutions. Inspired by their values, they push beyond what's possible so you can securely store your data and easily unlock its value. Visit Seagate.com to learn more.
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Links
Learn more about the Mozaic 3+ Platform
[00:00:00] Voiceover: Welcome to Writing the Future, your ultimate guide to decoding the future of data storage. Join us as we delve into the minds of leading engineers, researchers, product managers, and technologists from around the globe. Together, we'll navigate through the intricacies of tomorrow's data storage landscape.
[00:00:33] Shedding light on the latest innovations and breakthroughs. At the forefront of this revolution is Seagate Technology, empowering the boundless potential of data. Through captivating conversations, we'll journey through the evolution of data storage, uncovering the stories of those who pioneered its transformation.
[00:00:56] Come along as we unveil the blueprints for the future. Because in this podcast, we're not just predicting the future, we're writing it.
[00:01:15] In today's episode, we continue exploring Mozaic 3+ Seagate's breakthrough hard drive platform delivering unprecedented aerial densities of 3 terabytes per disk and beyond. We hear from Stephanie Hernandez, Senior Engineering Director of the Advanced Data Storage and Memory Group at Seagate, on how Mozaic Technology is changing the future of data storage.
[00:01:41] Stephanie Hernandez: I'm Stephanie Hernandez, and I'm the Senior Engineering Director of the Advanced Data Storage and Memory Group at Seagate Research. My team and I are responsible for researching advanced technologies for incorporation into future hard drive technologies. So, I've been working on hard drive technology for almost 20 years, first as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and then as an engineer at Seagate.
[00:02:07] When I started at Seagate, I was a reader designer, but for the better part of a decade, I've been working on the technology that's going into the Mozaic 3+ platform.
[00:02:18] Voiceover: Let's take a look inside the drive, inside the Mozaic 3+ platform.
[00:02:24] Stephanie Hernandez: The Mozaic 3+ Plus platform is the next step in hard drive technology.
[00:02:30] So the Mozaic platform is Seagate's answer to the so called magnetic recording trite limit. To keep increasing capacity, the particles within the media disk need to keep decreasing. However, they can become thermally unstable if they're too small. So to address that, Mozaic consists of three very important key advancements in hard drive technology.
[00:02:56] First, the iron platinum superlattice media is very magnetically hard and also very magnetically stable. Second, the nanoplasmonic writer applies optical spots in the media that are much smaller than what magnetic writers today are able to do in conventional technology. And third, our in house system on a ship takes all of these different components and is able to produce a product that has much higher capacities than conventional products.
[00:03:27] So with Mozaic technology, the materials that are going into the head and the media are very new, very novel, but we've been working on them for many, many years. And we've run thousands of experiments to understand what are the implications in terms of performance and reliability. So now we can confidently say that we've developed materials that will go into a hard drive product and Supply the reliability required for customer purposes.
[00:03:58] The technology within the drive is very unique, very different. The recording system is very advanced. But from the customer's view, it behaves in exactly the same way as conventional hard drive technology.
[00:04:11] Voiceover: Of course, there are several other technologies in hard drives and data storage. Let's hear Stephanie break it down for us.
[00:04:20] Stephanie Hernandez: So all of the data that you store today are stored in hard drives. So information is stored in bits, right? And each bit in a hard drive is only a few nanometers, you know, tens of nanometers. And what does that really mean? So a few nanometers is only several atoms. If you put several atoms together, you know, maybe 10 or something, that's the size of the bit.
[00:04:47] So this is how you can store Many gigabytes of movies and videos and photos, because the bit sizes, the fundamental unit of information is only a few atoms wide. So as we increase the aerial density and the capacity of hard drives, Less and less atoms are used to store the information, so we have to think of new materials that are able to sustain the information in a reliable way.
[00:05:17] Voiceover: Quick side note, let's hear Stephanie explain what aerial density is and how it affects the overall capacity of disk drive technology.
[00:05:27] Stephanie Hernandez: So aerial density is a metric that defines how many bits you could put on a disk. And so for a three terabyte per disk, um, platform, the bit lengths and bit sizes are in the order of tens of nanometers.
[00:05:41] So we're talking about millions of a centimeter. So very, very small dimensions. Now, this drive technology is very exciting because all of the components on the disk are made up of devices that can be measured in just atoms. So, that's where the Iron Platinum Superlattice material comes in. So, we've developed this Iron Platinum Superlattice media to be able to store smaller and smaller bits within the disk.
[00:06:10] Now, this media has very unique properties of large magnetic hardness, so it can only be written by a very unique writer, and that is the nanoplasmonic writer that's in Mozaic. The nanoplasmonic writer is very unique because now we have lasers and plasmonic materials and components within the writer.
[00:06:32] These apply a very small spot, so now we can write very, very small disk on this very reliable Iron Platinum media. The other part of it is, we also need very small sensors that will detect the fields coming from the disk. And that's also part of Mozaic technology. Now, the in house developed chip is going to take all of these different pieces together and deliver a product to our customers that has the performance and reliability that they need.
[00:07:00] Voiceover: Next, Stephanie explains how these new technologies allow for larger capacities than we've ever seen. Think beyond 3 terabytes per disk, 30 terabytes per drive. And that's only the beginning.
[00:07:17] Stephanie Hernandez: The technology within the Mozaic platform allows Seagate to unlock more than three terabyte per disk capacities.
[00:07:26] The reason for this is that the technology within the platform is very innovative, there's new materials, there's new physics that's in this, uh, new technology. And now the focus of my team is to understand how do we go from 3TB per disk to beyond that, to 5TB and beyond. Now all of these technologies will be based on Mozaic, so they will be based on iron platinum superlattice media, we will have the nanoplasmonic writer, and we will have our own unique in house design chips.
[00:07:58] Now, in order to keep scaling, the capacities, we're going to have to keep reducing the size of the media grains, reducing the size of the nanoplasmonic writer, improving our read sensors in order to keep writing smaller and smaller bits. So in my team, we run a lot of different experiments exploring the limits of hard drive technology.
[00:08:21] We take the best components that we can get and we do different experiments on them, like for example, We try to hit the highest aerial density that we can with the absolute best components that we have. We also do all kinds of simulation to try and evaluate different technologies that help us increase aerial density.
[00:08:47] Voiceover: Let's take a closer look at how Mozaic technology stands out from conventional methods. Stephanie breaks down what makes Mozaic different, emphasizing the paramount importance of increased capacity when it comes to disc drives. Mozaic is leading the charge in delivering exactly that. Now with
[00:09:09] Stephanie Hernandez: Mozaic technology, it scales much more favorably than conventional perpendicular magnetic recording technology.
[00:09:18] In conventional technology, we rely on a magnetic writer. And although you can make that writer very small, the field diminishes. So you cannot write bits at some point. So the data storage needs of the world are not decreasing anytime soon. We're all producing more and more data. We're watching more movies.
[00:09:38] We're taking more photos, taking more videos. The AI revolution is here. So more and more data will need to be created to develop these platforms and also these platforms will generate a lot of data. The hard disk drive technology has been increasing in capacity steadily over the last decades. However, there is a physical limitation to how much more we can increase the capacity of current hard drive technology.
[00:10:09] That is why Seagate has invested a lot of time, and money, and effort into the Mozaic technology. So in current hard drive products, the information is stored on a disk, and this disk is made up of magnetic particles. Now to keep increasing the capacity of the drive, we need to shrink the size of those particles.
[00:10:29] In current products, that material won't allow us to shrink because these particles will become magnetically unstable. So that's where the Mozaic technology comes in. So the Mozaic platform has been in development for over 20 years. Optical technology was very big back then, and the thought was how do we integrate that kind of technology within a disk drive technology.
[00:10:55] So increasing capacity is Seagate's number one focus. Conventional technology doesn't scale in a way that we need in order to keep increasing capacity of the drives that we need to sell to our customers. It's based on perpendicular magnetic recording. And that came out around 2005. And so when we implemented this technology at first, We had giant aerial density gains, and over time we keep improving the size of the component.
[00:11:24] So reducing the size of the media grains, reducing the size of the rider, improving the features that we add to it. But over the last few years, that aerial density, that capacity will roll over. And so at that point, you need to implement a new technology. The industry in general agrees that we need a paradigm shift in hard drive technology in order to keep increasing capacity.
[00:11:51] Now, more recently, Seagate, uh, committed completely to the Mozaic technology because we believe that's the only way to scale capacities. And our competitors have invested in different energy assist technologies. Now, we've done a lot of investigation, simulations, um, and a lot of research on these competing technologies, and we know that they are not able to scale like Mozaic technology can.
[00:12:17] And the key to this is that Mozaic media technology is based on iron platinum, which we know is very magnetically hard, and we're able to scale the grain sizes to levels to keep increasing aerial density. And so now, we are only limited By how small you can make the particles on the disk, and how small we can make that nanoplasmonic writer, and not by some fundamental physics.
[00:12:43] Uh, limitation, like in conventional recording technology.
[00:12:48] Voiceover: Seagate is truly leading the charge in hard drive technology, driving the industry forward with its groundbreaking Mozaic technology. Stephanie Sheds Light. on how Mozaic represents the next evolutionary leap in data storage and how Seagate is bringing it to the market.
[00:13:08] Stephanie Hernandez: We're actively engaged with the brightest minds in academia, and they're looking into what kind of media will go into future hard drive products, what the next generation nanoplasmonic writer will look like. We're also thinking of Different ways to write the information on the disk to keep increasing aerial density.
[00:13:28] Right now, we're at the top of the S curve for conventional recording technology. So that means we had to have worked on Mozaic technology many, many years ago, and that's what we did. And we committed to Mozaic technology as the next generation hard drive technology. So my team is focused on delivering the next big thing in data storage.
[00:13:51] And for us That's going to be Mozaic. Mozaic is the next big thing in data storage because in the box, which looks the same, are many, many different technologies that are able to increase capacity well beyond What we've seen in the past. Now Seagate is known for taking discoveries that, you know, scientists and, and academia have, um, been working on and then taking these ideas and putting them into a product.
[00:14:24] It doesn't take Seagate very long to productize discoveries. For example, we productized reader technology based on giant magnetoresistive effect. So that went from discovery to product. to product decision within a few years. Now, plasmonic effects have also been somewhat recently discovered, and now they're going into a hammer product.
[00:14:47] In the hard drive industry, we've been thinking that it's the end of hard drives for decades, and then We always come up with a new concept to keep increasing capacity. For example, before perpendicular magnetic technology was implemented, there was longitudinal, and people were saying, hey, the end of hard drives is near.
[00:15:11] We don't know how to keep reducing grain size or bit sizes because we wouldn't know how to write these bits with this particular technology. And then came perpendicular technology. And then came more advanced and more sensitive readers that have enabled us to increase capacity up to now. But again, we're at this point where we're at the fundamental limits of current technology.
[00:15:37] Now, technologies like Hammer, we've known about these concepts for a long time and have been working on them enough That now we're able to productize it. And now the technology has matured to a point that it's in customers hands, it's in data centers, and it meets their performance and reliability requirements.
[00:15:57] Voiceover: Your data storage is more than just information. It's your business, preserving valuable data and insights that matter. Stephanie delves into the profound significance of Seagate's technology, illustrating how it's ultimately designed with all of us in mind.
[00:16:15] Stephanie Hernandez: So, our main customers are the big data centers, and their customers are people like us.
[00:16:20] So, we're producing and consuming increasingly more content as time goes by. So, so much data is being created in the world, it needs to be stored somewhere. So, hard drives can't be made bigger, and also, it doesn't make sense to just Make data centers bigger and store more drives in there. So our customers are asking for higher and higher capacity to be able to store the world's data.
[00:16:46] So the Mozaic technology is there to provide increased capacity and also To allow our customers to record and retrieve data very quickly, and also have long lasting drives that are very reliable. With the Mozaic technology, we're able to supply increased capacity, but also total cost of ownership is actually decreased for our customers because we're storing much more data in the same box that they're used to having.
[00:17:15] Seagate's hard drive technology supplies the building blocks for the world's data. And now with this new technology, we can ensure that Seagate will be the leading manufacturer of hard drives and supply the best, the fastest, and the highest capacity drives out there.
[00:17:33] Voiceover: AI and machine learning represent the forefront of technological advancement.
[00:17:38] Promising to revolutionize how we work. It's crucial to explore how we can harness this power to continuously enhance productivity. Let's hear about how AI is impacting the workplace at Seagate.
[00:17:53] Stephanie Hernandez: So artificial intelligence and machine learning is becoming important in all facets of life, right? So in the things that we do inside of work, outside of work, in the content that we're creating, in the jobs that we do.
[00:18:08] And that is also true within Seagate and in how we're developing the new hard drive platforms. So, we use machine learning concepts to do many different things, for example, to understand how, the properties of our materials. Um, we use machine learning to help us figure out what the next designs will be.
[00:18:32] Machine learning and artificial intelligence are critical in helping Seagate deliver Today's Mozaic technology and future Mozaic technology.
[00:18:44] Voiceover: Stephanie takes a deep dive into the culture at Seagate and explores its pivotal role in shaping the company's growth.
[00:18:52] Stephanie Hernandez: Yeah, so working at Seagate for me has been trying to figure out the answers to questions that nobody knows how to answer, right?
[00:19:02] And what does that mean? That means I have to become better and better at my job. I have to gain new skills. I have to learn new things continuously. In addition to Performing in addition to delivering results. So, an analogy to normal life, that's why, you know, some people like to climb mountains or they like to run marathons or do martial arts because not only is it trying to achieve a goal, you're also developing a skill and you're getting better and better at it and mastering it.
[00:19:31] So, it's always trying to achieve the unachievable. It's what people at Seagate are always trying to do. So being in research, we have to consider any and all ideas. From the mundane to the crazy and, uh, interesting and unique and, and novel. Because we're considering so many ideas, you know, most of them are not going to work and some of them we're going to have to either throw away or put on a shelf and maybe come back to them later.
[00:20:01] But over time, as we gain more and more experience and more and more knowledge, we can go back to those ideas on the shelf and then revive them. And we've had a lot of experiences like that, that, you know, years ago, maybe 20 years ago, somebody looked at this technology, put it on a shelf, said, it's never going to work.
[00:20:19] But now we have all of these, all of this knowledge, all of this, all of these advancements in our belt that we can go back and take this technology off the and finally mature it and deliver it. Innovation is one of the core values of Seagate. And I tell my team, your biggest priority is to deliver the most innovative technology that you can.
[00:20:40] And what does that mean? That means not being limited in your mind and considering all different ideas and not to dismiss ideas out of hand because they don't immediately make sense or don't immediately work. It means, Having an open mind and looking at what's going on out there. Not just looking at what's going on within Seagate and what are people doing internally, even though that's important, but also looking at what are, what are professors doing, what are universities doing, what are other industries doing?
[00:21:12] What concepts are they working on that we could incorporate into what we're doing to advance hard drive technology? So, that's why we're very engaged with universities and funding external research, because we have these minds that have a different focus. And we're trying to bring in ideas from all of these different areas.
[00:21:33] And eventually, we'll be able to hire people from all of these different places and bring in new blood, new talent, and new thoughts into Seagate, and we can continue growing as an innovative company. Integrity is one of Seagate's values. And I believe It is a very strong value of everybody that I've worked with and everybody that I know at Seagate.
[00:21:53] It's not only doing our work to the best possible quality that we can, but also, I believe integrity is something that guides us in our interactions with our customers, our industry partners, our academic partners.
[00:22:09] Voiceover: It takes a truly global, diverse team to build these technologies. Stephanie describes what that means to her and her team.
[00:22:20] Stephanie Hernandez: I think inclusion is one of these things that's important to all of us at Seagate, and we try to hold up these values on our regular day to day interactions with everybody in the company. We have people from all over the world and I know everybody tries their best to engage all of the other people in other places and from other cultures at their level.
[00:22:44] Seagate's focus on inclusion is what has enabled us to grow as a technology company, as a leader in our industry, and to be able to deliver the highest capacity, best products out there. We have people from many different walks of life, many different cultures, many different backgrounds. And even though We're talking about culture, we're talking about personal differences.
[00:23:08] All of this feeds into our engineering and technological innovation because people think in different ways. And this will feed into our products, this feeds into our technology advancement. So, the technology in a hard drive, you know, spans, All engineering disciplines. We have electrical, we have mechanical, material scientists, all these people.
[00:23:32] We're flying a head on a disc. I mean, that's like flying a plane over the surface of the earth. I mean, the mechanics there are incredible. So the brain power required to take a hard drive from an idea, or any of the advancements in a hard drive from an idea, To a product requires people from different backgrounds, not only academic backgrounds, but also cultural backgrounds and personal backgrounds.
[00:24:02] So one of the most exciting things about my work at Seagate is that I get to interact with people from all over the world every day. And even the people that I work with in, in Minnesota, I mean, they're from very, very different backgrounds, very different places. And I also get to talk to people in in Asia and Europe, uh, on a regular basis.
[00:24:25] And it's always, you know, amazing to me that even though we're coming from these different backgrounds, we're all able to interact and collaborate and produce amazing technology. So that's the wonder of Seagate. It brings all these people together and what comes out is amazing.
[00:24:45] Voiceover: Another main focus at Seagate is sustainability.
[00:24:49] What goes into a drive and what comes out of it. Stephanie explains.
[00:24:55] Stephanie Hernandez: In order to keep producing higher and higher capacity hard drives, we need to keep doing a lot of research on different materials, and all of these different materials go into a drive. Most of the elements in the periodic table are actually represented inside of a hard drive.
[00:25:09] Now Seagate is focused in making sure that we're not being wasteful and just disposing of hard drives and not reusing the precious materials inside. So there's the Seagate Circularity Program that's focused on taking hard drives from our customers and making sure that we're reliably taking out the materials that we need to make future hard drives.
[00:25:30] while also ensuring that our customers data is safe. Seagate is focused on providing high capacity drives with its Mozaic platform, but we're also focused on making sure that we do so in an environmentally conscious way. The Mozaic platform is designed for this because as we keep increasing capacity and increasing the number of terabytes per disk, Actually, less power is needed in order to write the same amount of information.
[00:25:58] And also, with increasing capacity drives, we can fit more terabytes within the same space, so data centers don't need to be in, keep increasing in size or keep increasing in power requirements. In other words, the technology within Mozaic has enabled us to store more bits with the same power, so hard drives will be much more efficient in the future.
[00:26:20] At Seagate, we look forward to working with our customers and industry partners in crafting a more sustainable data sphere in the future.
[00:26:29] Voiceover: Let's hear Stephanie's closing thoughts on Seagate's future and the data storage industry. Her insights promise to offer a concise yet enlightening perspective on what lies ahead.
[00:26:42] Stephanie Hernandez: I'm very excited about the future of our company and the future of Seagate and the work that we're doing. This new platform will allow us to to not only keep increasing aerial density, but it opens up a huge space. So now we have a lot more opportunity to go after different advances and to scale our components and to try different devices that will go into a hard drive.
[00:27:07] So I'm very excited as we move forward that The technology is going to keep improving. We have many ideas of things that are going into hard drives. So hard drives are just one critical piece of the world's data infrastructure. And they have to, like all the other parts of the data infrastructure, They have to keep advancing over time, and they all have to work together in order to meet the world's data needs.
[00:27:33] Now, at Seagate, we believe that hard drives are here to stay because there's no other technology that can replace the role and function of a hard drive within data centers. And we believe we are well positioned with Mozaic Technology to keep increasing the capacity and the performance of hard drives to keep up with the needs of the world's data.
[00:27:53] So delivering the technology that goes into a hard drive. is, uh, a work of love, a painstaking work, um, that requires the collaboration of many different people. So, first of all, I want to thank my team and all of the engineering teams that we work with in tirelessly working to bring this technology to market.
[00:28:14] But also very important to this effort are all of the other teams within Seagate. Human resources, marketing, sales, facilities. It's a worldwide effort, tens of thousands of people in the company working to make Seagate a success and to deliver a product that our customers can use and that we can be proud of.
[00:28:37] Seagate is not just a hard drive company, it is a technology company. Our focus is on delivering advanced technologies, developing unique concepts, and taking them from inception to productization.
[00:28:52] Voiceover: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Writing the Future. We'd like to thank Stephanie Hernandez for joining us.
[00:28:59] for sharing her invaluable expertise on the future of data storage with Mozaic technology. Don't miss out on future episodes. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. For more information about Seagate, visit seagate. com. Until next time, let's continue writing the future together.