Seagate reveals first 36TB HAMR HDD

Seagate reported that it has expanded its line of HDDs with the Mozaic 3+ platform and now offers 36TB optionswhich are being tested by selected customers. The company also managed to build 6TB HAMR-based drives, enabling future 60TB HDDs.

In the same statement, the company reported that its Exos M hard drives, based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology and with a capacity of up to 32TB, have been adopted by a major cloud service providerand its production is expanding.

With the result, Seagate CEO Dave Mosley highlighted that “Seagate continues to lead in areal density, sampling drives on the Exos M platform up to 36TB today.” According to him, the company is executing the innovation roadmap while expanding cloud and AI technologies require large levels of storage.

“We are in the midst of a seismic shift in the way data is stored and managed”

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Technical Detail

Seagate stated that your 36TB HDD uses ten 3.6TB platters eachalthough it did not reveal whether it uses staggered magnetic recording (SMR) or conventional magnetic recording (CMR).

While HAMR allows for a significant increase in hard drive capacity, it is unlikely that Seagate would have increased platter capacity from 3.0TB to 3.6TB in about a year, so the 36TB HDD is likely to be an SMR drive.

Seagate’s initial family of HAMR-based Exos M hard drives currently includes a 30TB model using conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and a 32TB model using the staggered magnetic recording (SMR) format.

As large cloud service providers (CSPs) are familiar with efficiently managing SMR HDDs, it is not surprising that Seagate partners preferred the higher capacity scaled drives over the 30TB CMR-based offerings.

Adoption

Dell was an early adopter of the Mozaic 3+ platform and plans to incorporate 32TB Exos M drives into its high-density storage solutions soon. The company has been using Seagate technology to more reliably handle AI workloads.

As Travis Vigil, SVP of Product Management at ISG, reports, “Dell PowerScale with Seagate’s HAMR-enabled Mozaic 3+ technology plays a crucial role in supporting AI use cases such as recovery augmented generation (RAG), inference and agentic workflows.”

“Together, Dell Technologies and Seagate are setting the standard for industry-leading AI storage innovation.”

Seagate’s 36TB HDDs are now being tested with select customers. It remains to be seen how quickly Seagate’s partners among the big cloud service providers will qualify the 36TB Exos M HDDs, but this is likely to happen throughout 2025, so the company will ramp up production of these drives later this year.

Source: Seagate.