How to plan for HAMR or MAMR drives in MSP environments. HAMR and MAMR technologies enable increasingly high-capacity HDDs, making them relevant for organizations managing large-scale storage environments. However, dropping them into an existing environment without proper planning can cause some real headaches. In this video, we'll walk through how to plan for HAMR and MAMR drives the right way in MSP environments. Before we begin, be sure to subscribe to NinjaOne's IT Video Hub and our YouTube channel for more tech content like this. Introducing HAMR and MAMR drives in MSP environments. Set procurement criteria beyond capacity. HAMR and MAMR drives come with different operational characteristics, so here's what to keep in mind. Define your per workload needs, such as backup, object storage, or general NAS. Compare drive options across warranty terms, annualized failure rates, workload ratings, power and heat output, and vendor supply outlook. Run a pilot test on at least one shelf per platform, tracking temperatures, acoustics, and rebuild times. Validate platform and thermal compatibility. Instability presents a huge but often overlooked threat when it comes to HAMR and MAMR deployment. Just because a drive physically fits doesn't mean your platform is ready for it. First, confirm that your controller firmware and expander or backplane support drives above 20 terabytes. Then measure inlet and exhaust temperatures, set fan curves appropriately, and test for drive-to-drive vibration. Stress test rebuilds and scrubs under peak thermal load. You want to catch issues in a controlled environment, not during a production incident. Build a tiered data placement strategy. High-capacity HAMR and MAMR drives can be a strong fit for capacity-focused storage tiers, but placement should be based on the specific drive, recording method, and workload requirements. Hot data stays on NVMe or SA SSDs. Warm data moves to mid-capacity HDDs, and cold data, think backups, archives, and infrequently accessed objects, can land on HAMR or MAMR drives. Pair this strategy with erasure coding or RAID configured with rebuild time and fault tolerance in mind. Schedule regular scrubs and document your immutable retention policies for backup tiers. Raise your monitoring and firmware standards. Once these drives are in production, your monitoring practices need to keep up. Track temperature, SMART parameters, read and write latency, and lifetime terabytes written, making sure to set alerts based on trend slopes and threshold breaches. On the firmware side, standardize firmware versions across your fleet and stage upgrades through a pilot set before rolling out broadly. Also, log rebuild duration and scrub error rates so you can incorporate real-world results into capacity and risk planning. Prove backup and restore readiness. Stick to the three, two, one rule with at least one immutable copy and test restores monthly, including both your latest point and a mid-chain backup. Record your RTO and throughput each time to build a real baseline. Also, account for unrecoverable read error or URE risk as drive capacity and rebuild times increase. Make sure your RAID or erasure coding configuration, redundancy level, and rebuild time assumptions align with your risk policies before you actually need them. Govern lifecycle and vendor mix. Last but not least, diversify vendors and drive series across shelves to reduce correlated failure risk. Stagger your drive lifecycles so you're not rotating an entire shelf at once, and maintain a sparing policy that accounts for both rebuild times and supply chain lead times, which can run longer than expected on high-capacity drives. Deploying HAMR or MAMR drives successfully means treating it as a platform decision, not just a hardware swap. By following these steps, you'll be able to maximize data capacity while managing performance, reliability, power, cooling, and recoverability requirements. For more information, check out our official blog post on how to plan for HAMR or MAMR drives in MSP environments, linked in the description below.