Seagate he stated on Tuesday that its Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR)-based Exos M tough drives (up to 32TB capacity) have been adopted by a leading cloud service provider and are currently ramping up production. Additionally, the company announced that it has expanded its family of Mozaic 3+-based tough drives with a 36TB offering, which is currently available to select customers. The company also announced that it has successfully built HAMR-based platters with a capacity of 6 TB, which will enable the employ of 60 TB tough drives in the future.
“Seagate continues to lead in areal density, currently offering drive samples on the Exos M platform with capacities up to 36 TB,” said Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate. We are also executing our innovation roadmap and have successfully demonstrated over 6TB of capacity per drive in our test lab environments.”
Seagate said its 36TB tough drive uses ten 3.6TB platters, although it did not disclose whether it uses shingle or conventional magnetic recording. Although HAMR technology can significantly augment tough drive capacity, it is unlikely that Seagate will be able to augment platter capacity from 3.0 TB to 3.6 TB in about a year, so it is likely that a 36 TB tough drive is a SMR.
The initial Seagate Exos M HAMR-based tough drive family currently includes a 30 TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR) model and a 32 TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) model. Since vast cloud service providers (CSPs) know how to effectively manage SMR tough drives, it’s not surprising that partner Seagate preferred higher-capacity shingled drives over 30TB CMR-based offerings.
Dell is an early adopter of the Mozaic 3+ platform and plans to soon include 32TB Exos M drives in its high-density storage solutions.
“As customers expand their AI factories, they need cost-effective, scalable and flexible storage designed to reliably support the most demanding AI workloads,” said Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management at ISG. “Dell PowerScale with Seagate Mozaic 3+ technology supporting HAMR plays a key role in supporting AI applications such as augmented search generation (RAG), inference and agentic workflows. Together, Dell Technologies and Seagate are setting the standard for industry-leading AI-based storage innovation.”
Seagate 36TB hard drives are currently being sampled with select customers. Time will tell how quickly Seagate’s large cloud provider partners will qualify the 36TB Exos M hard drives, but it’s likely that this will happen in 2025, so the company will ramp up production of such drives later this year.
“We are in the midst of a seismic shift in the way we store and manage data,” said Dave Mosley. “Unprecedented levels of data creation – due to the continued growth of the cloud and the early adoption of artificial intelligence – require long-term data storage and access to ensure reliable data-driven results. From capturing training checkpoints to archiving source data sets, the more data organizations store, the better they will be able to verify that their applications are performing as expected and adjust course as needed.”
