Hyperscalers and enterprises will finally be able to buy 30TB hard drives in “early 2024,” Seagate CEO Dave Mosley has confirmed in his Q1 2024 earnings report. If confirmed, it would be the largest hard drive ever , but still lags behind the largest SSD in terms of capacity; the Solidigm D5-P5336 has a capacity of 61.44TB.
In a transcript obtained by the Colorful foolMosley confirmed that Seagate will likely begin aggressively ramping up 3TB per drive products based on HAMR technology in early 2024. 3TB refers to the drive capacity and Seagate puts ten of them on a hard drive.
Additionally, he added that these drives will deliver storage capacity of more than 30 TB – meaning Seagate plans to pack more platters per drive or use higher density platters – and that they will come in CMR or SMR configurations will come. Mosley hinted at a 32TB drive down the road during a Q&A session, and that was the expected capacity Seagate announced in June 2023 during another analyst update.
After that, the next big step will be the launch of 40 TB hard drives based on 4 TB platters, which Seagate’s CEO expects “in less than two years”, which would mean an announcement before November 2025, perhaps coinciding with the SC25. , the annual supercomputing conference. Mosley also confirmed Seagate’s commitment to sticking with HDD (rather than also betting on NAND as WD is doing).
He said: “Simply put, we offer customers massive data storage at less than one-fifth the cost of comparable NAND solutions per bit. We don’t expect that value gap to disappear compared to data center architectures in the next decade.”
30TB drives have been in the pipeline for a while: Seagate had an announcement two years ago And confirmed that select customers had already started testing the drive. Toshiba, another HDD vendor, confirmed this worked on drives of similar capacity. Other capacities confirmed after Seagate unveiled an Exos 24TB drive include 28TB and 36TB hard drives. A 50TB HAMR-based product is also on Seagatee’s roadmap a 2026 launch date has been set.
Archrival Western Digital has already launched a 26TB drivethe Ultrastar DCHC670but end users can’t buy it because it’s a host-managed SMR (more on that in our interview with WD’s Ravi Pendekanti, SVP HDD Product Management). It also confirmed that 28TB HDD is already in the hands of (enterprise/datacenter/hyperscale/nearline) customers, albeit in testing phase.