Seagate is now sampling 36TB hard drives based on HAMR technology

TL;DR: Seagate introduced heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) hard drives to the market, leading to advancements in magnetic storage technology. The company is now expanding the capacity of its next-generation storage units, with some concerns about I/O performance for customers.

Seagate began shipping HAMR tech hard drives in December 2024, marking a significant milestone in technology. The company is now unveiling even more advanced HAMR drives, capable of storing up to 36 terabytes.

The 36TB HAMR drives are currently undergoing testing and validation with select customers. Built on the Mozaic 3+ technology platform, these Exos M drives offer unprecedented areal density, achieved through a complex 10-platter design with 3.6TB per platter.

CEO Dave Mosley shared that Seagate has achieved an areal density of over 6TB per disk in testing, aiming to reach 10TB per platter. The Mozaic 3+ platform is designed to enhance storage efficiency, reducing total cost of ownership and energy consumption for the new Exos M drives.

HAMR drives are tailored for data centers, offering significantly more storage capacity within the same space. Seagate estimates a 25% reduction in cost per terabyte and a 60% decrease in power consumption per terabyte. Dell Technologies plans to integrate the Exos M 32TB drives into its high-density storage products soon.

Despite being at the forefront of magnetic storage technology, the new drives have a notable limitation not highlighted in Seagate’s press release. The highest-capacity models (32TB and 36TB) rely on shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to achieve their impressive storage capacity and areal density.

SMR-based drives feature overlapping data tracks that can impact write operations. However, this may not be a major concern for data centers and AI model training, which prioritize storing large amounts of data over frequent write operations.

IDC researcher Kuba Stolarski emphasized the importance of hard disk drives in AI applications and enterprise storage needs, with a majority of data stored by leading cloud services still relying on hard disk drives.