Seagate breaks largest HDD world record with 36TB hard drive and reveals 60TB model on the way
- The launch of the 36TB Exos M comes a month after a new 32TB model came to market
- Seagate is now well ahead of arch-rival Western Digital
- The technology of 10 TB per dish is also mentioned for the first time
Seagate has added a 36TB Exos M model to its growing family of data center hard drives, making it the ultimate solution largest hard drive currently available. The yet-to-be-named device is based on the company’s mature Mozaic 3+ platform and has been shipping to select customers, most likely hyperscalers like Microsoft or AWS.
The American storage company added a 32TB Exos M last monthalmost a year after it added its previous largest drive, a 30TB model. Rival Western Digital has a 32TB hard drive in its lineup, but unlike Seagate, it uses 11 platters (instead of 10) to achieve this capacity. The same goes for Toshiba; the Japanese company tested 31TB and 32TB models with 10 and 11 dishes.
The capacity of the dishes is something that Seagate is keen to tout as a unique selling point; the press release states that it is the only data storage company that can achieve an areal density of 3.6 TB per dish with a path to 10 TB in the future. That’s a whopping 100 TB hard drive in the pipeline.
60TB HDDs available soon
Seagate CEO Dave Mosley also announced that the company has successfully demonstrated dish capacities of more than 6TB per dish in laboratory environments. That means there are 60TB hard drives are within reach and should arrive before the end of this decade (or as in marketing jargon, depending on market conditions).
With this 36TB model, Seagate is moving away from CMR and SMR to exclusively embrace HAMR technology; Heat-assisted magnetic recording enables a 25% cost savings per TB and a 60% reduction in energy consumption per TB, according to Seagate. That relentless push for cheaper storage is what will keep the HDD relevant, despite SSDs’ supremacy in performance, storage density and power consumption.
122 TB SSDs are expected to hit the market 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 4x or 5x more expensive than a 36TB HDD, but they will appeal to some specific customers.
In a statement, a Dell spokesperson also explained that affordable, large-capacity HDDs will play a role in AI workloads, supporting use cases such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), inferencing and agentic workflows.
It’s unlikely the 36TB HDD will ever be available for retail sale in the near future due to corporate demand; the largest internal hard drive you can buy is a 26TB Western Digital Gold Enterprise HDD with larger capacities typically only available through partners or system integrators.