Seagate has officially launched the first-ever 30TB hard drive – the Exos The good news is that despite the fact that the drive will initially be aimed at hyperscalers and enterprise markets, it will eventually be sold. users and will be readable without specialist hardware.
According to BS Teh, the company’s Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, whom I interviewed last week ahead of the launch, the US-based storage giant achieved this milestone by leveraging a number of breakthrough, in-house technologies that made it possible to cram more TB per dish.
Suggested in October 2023 by Seagate CEOthe disc was already featured on Supercomputing 23 last year as the Exos
BS Teh confirmed that there are no plans to increase the number of platters as this would be detrimental to noise, cost, reliability, weight and power consumption (and heat dissipation).
Ten 3TB platters were used and there are plans to have a higher capacity model, either using HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) on its own or SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) using HAMR for hyperscale customers who would like to get the best value for money, albeit with caveats. SMR + HAMR may not be readable on consumer grade hardware.
HDD capacity turbocharged
The previous capacity champion was Western Digital Gold, with a capacity of 24 TB. Seagate’s archrival announced that it is working on 28TB hard drives, but has not yet formally launched them. The other major hard drive player – Toshiba – has plans to launch 50TB models in the future, but has not yet unveiled any drives larger than 22TB.
Seagate confirmed that the drive will be cheaper per terabyte compared to existing models. BS Tech explained that the new drives are based on existing technologies used by Seagate – including the chassis, motors and most of the electronics – meaning development costs are much lower than for a brand new product line.
Assuming a price of $15 per terabyte, a 30TB drive would cost about $450, which is a bargain, bringing the cost of a 1PB storage capacity, which can store more than 30,000 Blu-ray movies, to about $14,000.
30TB drives have been in the pipeline for a while: Seagate had an announcement two years ago And confirmed that select customers were 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 32TB and 36TB hard drives
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.