Seagate smashes largest HDD world record with 36TB hard drive and reveals a 60TB model is coming

(Image credit: Seagate)

Launch of 36TB Exos M happens a month after a new 32TB model emerged
Seagate is now comfortably ahead of arch-rival Western Digital
For the first time, 10TB-per-platter technology has also been mentioned

Seagate added a 36TB Exos M model to its growing family of datacenter hard disk drives, making it the largest hard disk drive currently available. The yet-to-be-named device is based on the company's mature Mozaic 3+ platform and has been shipped to select customers, most likely hyperscalers like Microsoft or AWS.

The US storage company added a 32TB Exos M last month, almost one year after it added its previous largest drive, a 30TB model. Rival Western Digital has a 32TB HDD in its line up but unlike Seagate, uses 11 platters (rather than 10) to reach this capacity. The same goes for Toshiba; the Japanese firm tested 31TB and 32TB models with 10 and 11 platters.

Platter capacity is something Seagate has been keen to tout as a unique selling point; its press release mentions that it is the only data storage company that can achieve areal densities of 3.6TB per platter with a pathway to 10TB in the future. That's a whopping 100TB hard drive in the pipeline.

60TB HDDs coming soon

Seagate's CEO, Dave Mosley, also disclosed that the company has successfully demonstrated platter capacities of over 6TB per platter in lab environments. That means that 60TB hard drives are within reach and should arrive before the end of the decade (or as in marketing lingo, depending on market conditions).

With this 36TB model, Seagate moves away from CMR and SMR to embrace HAMR technology exclusively; Heat-assisted magnetic recording, Seagate says, enables a 25% cost reduction per TB and a 60% decrease in power consumption per TB. That relentless drive towards cheaper storage is what will keep HDD relevant despite SSDs supremacy on performance, storage density and power consumption.

122TB SSDs are expected to go on sale later this year, targeting the same lucrative datacenter market but different tiers. At an estimated cost of $80 per TB, they would still be 4x or 5X more expensive than one 36TB HDD but will appeal to certain specific customers.

In a statement, a Dell spokesperson also explained that large capacity, affordable HDDs will play in AI workloads, supporting use cases like retrieval augmented generation (RAG), inferencing and agentic workflows.

The 36TB HDD is unlikely to ever go on sale in retail for the foreseeable future due to enterprise demand; the largest internal hard disk drive you can buy is a 26TB Western Digital Gold Enterprise HDD with larger capacities usually available only via partners or system integrators.

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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.