- The launch of the 36TB Exos M comes a month after a new 32TB model emerged
- Seagate is now comfortably ahead of archrival Western Digital
- For the first time, 10 TB per dish technology is also mentioned
Seagate has added a 36TB Exos M model to its growing family of data center hard drives, making it the largest hard drive currently available. The as-yet-unnamed device is based on the company’s mature Mozaic 3+ platform and has been shipped to select customers, likely hyperscalers like Microsoft or AWS.
The American storage company added a 32TB Exos M last monthalmost a year after adding its previous largest drive, a 30TB model. Rival Western Digital has a 32 TB hard drive in its line, but unlike Seagate, it uses 11 platters (instead of 10) to achieve this capacity. The same goes for Toshiba; the Japanese firm tested 31TB and 32TB models with 10 and 11 plates.
The platter’s capacity is something Seagate has wanted to promote as a unique selling point; Its press release mentions that it is the only data storage company that can achieve areal densities of 3.6TB per platter with a path to 10TB in the future. This is a huge 100TB hard drive in the pipeline.
60 TB hard drives coming soon
Seagate CEO Dave Mosley also revealed that the company has successfully demonstrated drive capacities of more than 6TB per platter in laboratory environments. That means 60TB hard drives They are within reach and should arrive before the end of the decade (or as they say in marketing jargon, depending on market conditions).
With this 36 TB model, Seagate moves away from CMR and SMR to exclusively adopt HAMR technology; Heat-assisted magnetic recording, Seagate claims, enables a 25% cost reduction per TB and a 60% decrease in power consumption per TB. That relentless push toward cheaper storage is what will keep HDDs relevant despite SSDs’ supremacy in performance, storage density, and power consumption.
122TB SSD They are expected to go on sale later this year, targeting the same lucrative data center market but at different levels. At an estimated cost of $80 per TB, they would still be 4 or 5 times more expensive than a 36TB hard drive, but they will appeal to certain specific customers.
In a statement, a Dell spokesperson also explained that affordable, high-capacity hard drives will play a role in AI workloads, supporting use cases such as recovery augmented generation (RAG), inference, and workflows. agents work.
The 36TB hard drive is unlikely to go on sale at retail in the foreseeable future due to enterprise demand; The largest internal hard drive you can buy is a Western Digital Gold Enterprise 26TB hard drive with larger capacities that are typically only available through partners or system integrators.
