The development of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) may be boosted by the recent purchase of Samsung's hard disk drive (HDD) operations business by Seagate, industry commentators have suggested.

HAMR uses a laser to pre-heat a platinum alloy, onto which data can be recorded, allowing smaller pieces of information to be written closer together without the risk of data corruption.

Speaking to Computer World, research director of IDC's hard disk drive research business John Rydning said this market consolidation will allow vendors like Seagate to help speed the development of HAMR and bit-patterned recording technologies.

"Some of the next-generation HDD technology is pretty complex and pretty expensive," he explained.

"If you had five players all chasing that, it means you've got five R&D centres, and you've got five sizeable capital investments."

John Webster, a senior partner at Evaluator Group, added that 90 per cent of the HDD market will now be split evenly between Western Digital and Seagate, with Toshiba "playing in some niche opportunities".

Seagate announced this week that it had agreed to purchase Samsung's HDD operations for approximately $1.4 billion (£845 million).

The news comes as the latest figures from IHS iSuppli suggest that Samsung is increasingly challenging Intel's dominance of the worldwide semiconductor market.

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Seagate-Samsung deal to spur HDD, SSD, hybrid drive development (19/04/11)

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