- Seagate claims to have achieved 6.9 TB platters in its laboratory using HAMR technology
- Outgoing 30TB drives use ten 3TB platters for maximum storage
- 4TB, 5TB and 6TB mid-tier platters will enter production in 2027-2029
Seagate announced that it has successfully developed 6.9TB platters in its laboratory, marking a significant milestone in future hard drive technology.
The company says these experimental platters more than double the capacity of those used in current commercial drives.
Outgoing models, such as Seagate’s 30TB HAMR hard drives, use ten 3TB platters to reach maximum capacity.
HAMR technology and storage density
With the new 6.9TB platters, a single hard drive could reach between 55TB and 69TB while maintaining the same physical form factor.
This level of storage density has not yet been implemented in consumer or enterprise products, but it demonstrates the physical limitations of modern HAMR technology.
The high-capacity platters rely on Seagate’s Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, or HAMR, which applies heat to reduce magnetic coercivity during the writing process.
This allows data to be stored more densely than on conventional hard drives.
In today’s players, HAMR is combined with techniques such as Mozaic 3+ to reduce media grain size and improve registration accuracy.
By applying these advances to larger platters, Seagate has created the potential for drives capable of storing more than twice the data of existing models without increasing size or weight.
Seagate has indicated that the 6.9TB platters will not be used in official products until around 2030.
Until then, the company is developing 4TB, 5TB and 6TB intermediate platforms, with production planned for 2027, 2028 and 2029 respectively.
Beyond 2031, Seagate projects even larger platters, ranging from 7TB to 15TB, suggesting the possibility of petabyte-sized hard drives before 2040.
Despite the rise of SSDs, hard drives remain essential for large-scale storage due to their higher capacity per dollar and long-term reliability.
The AI boom has intensified demand, leading to prolonged backorders for enterprise hard drives.
While consumer-facing storage solutions, such as USB flash drives and smaller SSDs, are growing in popularity, high-capacity hard drives remain the backbone of data centers and archival storage.
Via TomsHardware
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
