Seagate breaks world record for hard drives with a 36TB model and announces the arrival of a 60TB one.
The world's largest hard drive manufacturer managed to increase its capacity by 4TB in just one month, surpassing its previous record.
Seagate has launched a new 36TB Exos M hard drive model, making it the largest hard drive available on the current market. This device, based on the Mozaic 3+ platform, has already been shipped to select customers, likely large-scale companies like Microsoft or AWS. This release comes one month after the introduction of the 32TB model and nearly a year after the presentation of the 30TB drive.
Unlike Seagate, Western Digital offers a 32TB HDD that uses 11 disks to achieve that capacity, while Toshiba has also been testing 31TB and 32TB models with 10 and 11 platter configurations. Seagate has highlighted that its drives achieve a density of 3.6TB per platter, with the potential to reach up to 10TB in the future, which could lead to the creation of a 100TB HDD.
Seagate CEO Dave Mosley mentioned that the company has demonstrated capabilities of over 6TB per platter in laboratory environments, suggesting that 60TB hard drives could be available before the end of this decade, depending on market conditions. With the new 36TB model, Seagate has moved away from CMR and SMR technologies, opting exclusively for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which allows for a 25% reduction in cost per TB and a 60% decrease in energy consumption per TB.
This focus on more cost-effective storage helps keep HDDs relevant despite the superiority of SSDs in terms of performance and energy efficiency. 122TB SSDs are expected to go on sale later this year, targeting the same data center market, although at a much higher cost per TB.
A representative from Dell noted that high-capacity, affordable HDDs will play a crucial role in artificial intelligence workloads, supporting use cases such as augmented generation and inferencing. However, it is unlikely that the 36TB HDD will be available for retail sale in the near future due to high enterprise demand, while the largest internal hard drive currently available for purchase is a 26TB model from Western Digital.
