Stefan Mileschin

HOYA Corp., an optical glass maker from Japan, announced this week that it had started construction of its new production facility for hard drive platter glass substrates. These substrates could be used to make conventional 2.5-inch HDD platters as well as next-generation platters for hard drives that use energy-assisted magnetic recording technologies (HAMR, MAMR).

The manufacturing facility will cost HOYA around ¥30 billion ($270.5 million) and will start production at the beginning of 2020, according to a media report. Located in the Saysettha Development Zone (SDZ) in Laos, the factory will be HOYA’s third plant that produces glass substrates for hard drives. Being the newest one, the facility will use the latest manufacturing equipment and technologies, so it will be ready to make the most advanced substrates that will then be used by makers of platters (e.g., Seagate, Showa Denko, Western Digital) to manufacture next-gen HDD media. HOYA’s other substrate manufacturing capacities are located in Thailand, and Vietnam.

Nowadays glass substrates for HDD platters are mainly used to make media for 2.5-inch hard drives for laptops and datacenters. As sales of 2.5-inch HDDs for notebooks are dropping because of cheaper SSDs, demand for these platters and substrates is decreasing as well. In the meantime, the use of glass substrates and platters in 3.5-inch drives is gaining traction as makers of datacenter HDDs start to use them both for existing and next-gen hard drives that use energy-assisted recording technologies. Glass substrates have a number of advantages when compared to aluminum substrates: they are thinner, lighter, more rigid, they expand less than aluminum when heated, and they may be made flatter. In the end, they are more preferrable for next-gen high-capacity HDDs.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13954...ction-facility