- Launch of 36TB Exos M occurs a month after a brand new 32TB mannequin emerged
- Seagate is now comfortably forward of arch-rival Western Digital
- For the primary time, 10TB-per-platter expertise has additionally been talked about
Seagate added a 36TB Exos M mannequin to its rising household of datacenter exhausting disk drives, making it the largest exhausting disk drive at present accessible. The yet-to-be-named machine is predicated on the corporate’s mature Mozaic 3+ platform and has been shipped to pick out prospects, more than likely hyperscalers like Microsoft or AWS.
The US storage firm added a 32TB Exos M final month, virtually one 12 months after it added its earlier largest drive, a 30TB mannequin. Rival Western Digital has a 32TB HDD in its line up however not like Seagate, makes use of 11 platters (moderately than 10) to achieve this capability. The identical goes for Toshiba; the Japanese agency examined 31TB and 32TB fashions with 10 and 11 platters.
Platter capability is one thing Seagate has been eager to tout as a novel promoting level; its press launch mentions that it’s the solely information storage firm that may obtain areal densities of three.6TB per platter with a pathway to 10TB sooner or later. That is a whopping 100TB exhausting drive within the pipeline.
60TB HDDs coming quickly
Seagate’s CEO, Dave Mosley, additionally disclosed that the corporate has efficiently demonstrated platter capacities of over 6TB per platter in lab environments. That signifies that 60TB exhausting drives are inside attain and may arrive earlier than the top of the last decade (or as in advertising and marketing lingo, relying on market situations).
With this 36TB mannequin, Seagate strikes away from CMR and SMR to embrace HAMR expertise solely; Warmth-assisted magnetic recording, Seagate says, permits a 25% price discount per TB and a 60% lower in energy consumption per TB. That relentless drive in direction of cheaper storage is what is going to hold HDD related regardless of SSDs supremacy on efficiency, storage density and energy consumption.
122TB SSDs are anticipated to go on sale later this 12 months, focusing on the identical profitable datacenter market however totally different tiers. At an estimated price of $80 per TB, they might nonetheless be 4x or 5X costlier than one 36TB HDD however will attraction to sure particular prospects.
In a press release, a Dell spokesperson additionally defined that enormous capability, inexpensive HDDs will play in AI workloads, supporting use circumstances like retrieval augmented era (RAG), inferencing and agentic workflows.
The 36TB HDD is unlikely to ever go on sale in retail for the foreseeable future on account of enterprise demand; the most important inner exhausting disk drive you should buy is a 26TB Western Digital Gold Enterprise HDD with bigger capacities often accessible solely by way of companions or system integrators.