Eric Shobe | Senior Manager
Dropbox

Shobe is a senior hardware and infrastructure leader with experience designing and operating large-scale compute/storage environments. He has led complex infrastructure deployments across global operations, with a focus on storage systems, platform reliability, and operational scale. His work centers on building resilient systems that perform under demanding production workload

Appearances:

Future of Memory and Storage - Day 2 @ 16:05

Operating HAMR at Scale: Qualification, Reliability and Fleet Readiness

Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) marks the next step in magnetic recording as capacities move beyond 30TB and continue to grow. While density gains are well understood, operating HAMR drives in production introduces new qualification, reliability and fleet management considerations. Localized heating affects media behavior, write stability and failure patterns, requiring adjustments in characterization, burn in strategy, stress validation and telemetry thresholds.

This session shares practical lessons from qualifying and deploying HAMR drives in production environments and the framework used to prepare additional vendors for fleet introduction. We will discuss how reliability modeling, rebuild dynamics and telemetry interpretation evolved and how drive level signals such as FARM/FACT telemetry logs and other vendor diagnostic logs are used to identify emerging failure patterns. The focus is on operational reality and ensuring that higher capacity translates into sustainable fleet scale deployment.

Vishal Jose Mannanal, Storage Technologist, Dropbox