Seagate Ramps Breakthrough 30TB HDDs To Kick Off A New Era In Bulk Storage

Seagate is announcing the launch of its Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform, allowing it to offer customers hard drives with a staggering 30TB+ of capacity. These new hard drives use the company’s Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, and can reach densities of 3TB per platter. However, Seagate claims that it’s already well on its way to achieving densities of 4TB and 5TB per platter.

It isn’t just HAMR technology that’s making the difference with these new drives, though. Seagate is also using Superlattice Platinum-Alloy Media, which enables the company to reach the stability necessary to use smaller media grain sizes. This is a key technology that is enabling Seagate to reach the densities they’re now able to offer to customers.

Moreover, these new hard drives also use a Plasmonic Writer. It’s an upgrade Seagate needed to make because of the use of the Superlattice Platinum-Alloy Media, which is “magnetically harder.” This new writer is incredibly small and uses a nanophotonic laser to generate a heat spot on the disk to reliably write data.


Data centers will be the big winners with the breakthroughs Seagate is bringing to the market. According to the company this new platform “uses roughly the same material components as PMR hard drives while dramatically increasing capacity, allowing data centers to significantly lower storage acquisition and operational costs—including a 40% improvement in per terabyte power consumption.”

While the consumer space has mostly moved on from platter-based drives in favor of solid-state storage (at least for their primary/boot storage), it’s always interesting to see how companies such as Seagate are continuing to innovate. It will also undoubtedly bring a smile to the faces of users on the data hoarder subreddit.