Wednesday, December 18th 2024

Seagate Preparing Its First High-Capacity HAMR Hard Drive
Seagate is getting ready to release its biggest hard drive, featuring a 32 TB capacity through new Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology; this milestone comes after nearly a decade and a half of anticipation. Seagate first tested HAMR technology in 2007. The company has repeatedly promised that HAMR-based drives would be available within a few years; however, those predictions have been repeatedly postponed until now.
New Exos drives based on the Mozaic 3+ platform have been available in limited quantities for select customers. Now that they are in mass production, Seagate has quietly revealed the product page for its Exos M HDDs. The lineup includes a 32 TB model that uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology and a 30 TB model that uses Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). Seagate says its Exos M hard drive has a 3 TB per platter density.One important advancement is the compatibility of Exos M drives with existing systems. This is critical for widespread adoption. Previous iterations of the Mozaic 3+ HDDs would require new hardware, which would be a major obstacle to upgrading. Details on how the Exos M differs from the original Mozaic 3+ drives remain somewhat vague, as limited technical information is provided on the product page.
This launch marks a significant moment for Seagate, finally bringing to market technology they have been developing for years. In October, rival Western Digital launched a 32 TB hard drive using energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), while Toshiba demonstrated high-capacity hard drives with HAMR and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology.
Sources:
TechSpot, Seagate
New Exos drives based on the Mozaic 3+ platform have been available in limited quantities for select customers. Now that they are in mass production, Seagate has quietly revealed the product page for its Exos M HDDs. The lineup includes a 32 TB model that uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology and a 30 TB model that uses Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). Seagate says its Exos M hard drive has a 3 TB per platter density.One important advancement is the compatibility of Exos M drives with existing systems. This is critical for widespread adoption. Previous iterations of the Mozaic 3+ HDDs would require new hardware, which would be a major obstacle to upgrading. Details on how the Exos M differs from the original Mozaic 3+ drives remain somewhat vague, as limited technical information is provided on the product page.
This launch marks a significant moment for Seagate, finally bringing to market technology they have been developing for years. In October, rival Western Digital launched a 32 TB hard drive using energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), while Toshiba demonstrated high-capacity hard drives with HAMR and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology.
21 Comments on Seagate Preparing Its First High-Capacity HAMR Hard Drive
Must be some AI bot thingy making up those marketing names....can you find any more ways to insult our intelligence ????
My current definition of High capacity are 1 Petabyte or higher.
edit: My expectation was much higher capacity as I'm aware of. factor 30 seems reasonable for the "high" label.
@tommorow thanks for the clarification that this drive does not even hit 30Tib (file system storage, partition table, base 2)
www.techpowerup.com/273896/seagate-20-tb-hamr-drives-arrive-in-december-50-tb-capacities-in-2026
The new drives are actually specced slower than older models:
Exos X24 series (12-24TB) - 285MB/sec (same as IronWolf Pro and others)
Exos Xz series (30-32TB) - 270MB/sec
Something similar with WD:
HC580 24TB: 298MB/sec
HC690 32TB: 269MB/sec
In 2018 they promised 100TB in 2025. They have not reached even 1/3rd of this capacity yet. Another lie.
In 2019 they "downgraded" their promise to 50TB in 2026. They have not reached even 32TB by 2025. Another lie.
Last year they promised we would have 40TB+ this year. Well the year is ending and they're only now "prepping" 32TB. Another lie.
On Jan 17th of 2024 (this year) they promised that their 30TB drives are ramping and shipped to hyperscalers in Q1 2024.
It's the end of Q4 2024 and the average person still cant buy this mythical 30TB model that supposedly is produced in mass. Another lie.
So forgive me if it dont give a rats a** about their supposed 32TB models being "prepared" (whatever that means). Yes but formatted capacity, meaning actual usable space is lower. 10 nomenclature is meaningless number if the user is not able to fully utilize said capacity.
It only sucks that HDD companies pretty much have a majority stake on, or are SSD companies themselves. The SSD market's stagnation and almost complete absence of drives exceeding 8 TB, which are kept expensive, is entirely artificial and if this much effort was put into the solid-state industry, we'd have affordable ~100 TB consumer-grade SSDs by the end of the decade.
I've had defrags on these take longer than a day to complete.
But that's not news anymore, it's just the nature of HDDs, which are more "archival" nowadays.
SSDs for long-term storage sounds to me like a risk, even ignoring the price. I never got the bickering around ^2 vs ^10 sizes.
HDDs (like networking) have always been base-10. I prefer that, and it makes sense, since humans find it easier to count and calculate in base-10.
The formatted capacity is not lower. There are filesystem structures that take up space. How much space varies based on your filesystem of choice, and your specific collection of files.
Unless you mean that some OSes choose to show sizes as base-2. That's a puzzling choice, and I don't understand why they don't let you at least configure the display to your preference.
#nVmE4Me4Eva"
or at least until something better comes along anyways....
However, I have also found that a few well-placed shots from my .44 Magnum is pretty effective as well, hahaha :)