Seagate on Tuesday stated that its Exos M arduous drives, primarily based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology (with capability factors of as much as 32TB) has been adopted by a number one cloud service supplier, and its manufacturing is now ramping up. Moreover, the corporate mentioned that it had prolonged its household of Mozaic 3+ platform-based HDDs with a 36TB providing that’s now sampling with choose prospects. The corporate additionally mentioned that it had managed to construct 6TB HAMR-based platters, enabling 60TB HDDs sooner or later.
“Seagate continues to steer in areal density, sampling drives on the Exos M platform of as much as 36TB in the present day,” mentioned Dave Mosley, Seagate CEO. Additionally, we’re executing on our innovation roadmap, having now efficiently demonstrated capacities of over 6TB per disk inside our check lab environments.”
Seagate mentioned that its 36TB HDD makes use of ten 3.6TB platters, although it didn’t reveal whether or not it makes use of shingled magnetic recording or standard magnetic recording. Whereas HAMR permits for a big enhance arduous drive capability, it’s unlikely that Seagate managed to extend platter capability from 3.0TB to three.6TB in a few 12 months, so it’s possible that the 36TB HDD is an SMR drive.
Seagate’s preliminary household of Exos M HAMR-based arduous drives at present features a 30TB mannequin utilizing standard magnetic recording (CMR) and a 32TB mannequin utilizing the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) format. Since giant cloud service suppliers (CSPs) are aware of find out how to effectively handle SMR HDDs, it isn’t stunning that Seagate’s associate most well-liked the higher-capacity shingled drives over CMR-based 30TB choices.
Dell is without doubt one of the preliminary adopters of the Mozaic 3+ platform and plans to include the 32TB Exos M drives into its high-density storage options quickly.
“As prospects construct out their AI factories, they want cost-efficient, scalable and versatile storage engineered to reliably deal with essentially the most demanding AI workloads,” mentioned Travis Vigil, SVP, ISG Product Administration. “Dell PowerScale with Seagate’s HAMR-enabled Mozaic 3+ know-how performs a vital position in supporting AI use instances like retrieval augmented technology (RAG), inferencing and agentic workflows. Collectively, Dell Applied sciences and Seagate are setting the usual for industry-leading AI storage innovation.”
Seagate’s 36TB HDDs are actually sampling with choose purchasers. It stays to be seen how briskly Seagate’s companions amongst giant cloud service suppliers will qualify 36TB Exos M HDDs, however it’s possible that this can occur over 2025, so the corporate will ramp up manufacturing of such drives later this 12 months.
“We’re within the midst of a seismic shift in the way in which information is saved and managed,” mentioned Dave Mosley. “Unprecedented ranges of information creation – because of continued cloud enlargement and early AI adoption – demand long-term information retention and entry to make sure reliable data-driven outcomes. From capturing coaching checkpoints to archiving source-data units, the extra information organizations retain, the extra they will validate that their functions are appearing as they anticipate them to – and regulate course as wanted.”
