- Seagate says it has achieved 6.9TB drives in its lab using HAMR technology
- Outgoing 30TB drives use ten 3TB platters for maximum storage
- 4TB, 5TB and 6TB midplatforms will enter production in 2027-2029
Seagate has announced that it has successfully developed 6.9TB platters in its laboratory, marking a major milestone in future hard drive technology.
The company says these experimental plates more than double the capacity of those used in current commercial units.
Outgoing models, such as Seagate’s 30TB HAMR hard drives, use ten 3TB platters to reach maximum capacity.
HAMR technology and storage density
With the new 6.9TB platters, a single hard drive could reach between 55TB and 69TB while maintaining the same physical form factor.
This level of storage density has not yet been implemented in consumer or enterprise products, but it demonstrates the physical limits of modern HAMR technology.
The high-capacity platters rely on Seagate’s heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, which applies heat to reduce magnetic coercivity during the writing process.
This allows data to be stored more densely than on conventional hard drives.
In today’s drives, HAMR is combined with techniques such as Mozaic 3+ to reduce the grain size of the media and improve recording accuracy.
By applying these advances to larger platters, Seagate has created potential for drives that could store more than twice as much data as existing models without increasing size or weight.
Seagate has indicated that 6.9TB drives will not be used in official products until around 2030.
Before that, the company is developing 4TB, 5TB, and 6TB midplatforms, with production expected in 2027, 2028, and 2029, respectively.
Beyond 2031, Seagate projects even larger platters, ranging from 7TB to 15TB, suggesting the possibility of petabyte-sized hard drives before 2040.
Despite the rise of SSDs, hard drives remain crucial for large-scale storage due to their superior capacity per dollar and long-term reliability.
The rise of AI has intensified demand, leading to backorders for enterprise-class units.
While consumer-focused storage solutions such as USB drives and smaller SSDs are gaining popularity, high-capacity hard drives remain the backbone of data centers and file storage.
Via TomsHardware
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