Seagate

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Seagate’s massive, 30TB, $600 hard drives are now available for anyone to buy

HAMR, hard drives, Seagate, Tech / /

The drives are based on Seagate’s Mosaic 3+ platform, which “incorporates Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR to deliver mass-capacity storage at unprecedented areal densities of 3TB per disk and beyond.”

Seagate’s press release is focused mostly on the large drives’ suitability for AI-related data storage—”AI” is mentioned in the body text 21 times, and it’s not a long release. But obviously, they’ll be useful for any kind of storage where you need as many TB as possible to fit into as small a space as possible.

Although most consumer PCs have moved away from hard drives with spinning platters, they still provide the best storage-per-gigabyte for huge data centers where ultra-fast performance isn’t necessary. Huge data center SSDs are also available but at much higher prices.

Seagate competitor Western Digital says that its first HAMR-based drives are due in 2027, though it has managed to reach 32TB using SMR technology. Toshiba is testing HAMR drives and has said it will sample some drives for testing in 2025, but it hasn’t committed to a timeline for public availability.

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After decades of talk, Seagate seems ready to actually drop the HAMR hard drives

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How do you fit 32 terabytes of storage into a hard drive? With a HAMR.

Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, since at least 2002. The firm has occasionally popped up to offer a demonstration or make yet another “around the corner” pronouncement. The press has enjoyed myriad chances to celebrate the wordplay of Stanley Kirk Burrell, but new qualification from large-scale customers might mean HAMR drives will be actually available, to buy, as physical objects, for anyone who can afford the most magnetic space possible. Third decade’s the charm, perhaps.

HAMR works on the principle that, when heated, a disk’s magnetic materials can hold more data in smaller spaces, such that you can fit more overall data on the drive. It’s not just putting a tiny hot plate inside an HDD chassis; as Seagate explains in its technical paper, “the entire process—heating, writing, and cooling—takes less than 1 nanosecond.” Getting from a physics concept to an actual drive involved adding a laser diode to the drive head, optical steering, firmware alterations, and “a million other little things that engineers spent countless hours developing.” Seagate has a lot more about Mozaic 3+ on its site.

Seagate’s rendering of how its unique heating laser head allows for 3TB per magnetic platter in Mozaic drives.

Seagate’s rendering of how its unique heating laser head allows for 3TB per magnetic platter in Mozaic drives. Credit: Seagate

Drives based on Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ platform, in standard drive sizes, will soon arrive with wider availability than its initial test batches. The driver maker put in a financial filing earlier this month (PDF) that it had completed qualification testing with several large-volume customers, including “a leading cloud service provider,” akin to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or the like. Volume shipments are likely soon to follow.

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