- The launch of the 36TB Exos M comes a month after the emergence of a new 32TB model.
- Seagate is now comfortably ahead of its main rival Western Digital
- For the first time, 10 TB per tray technology was also mentioned
Seagate has added a 36TB Exos M model to its growing family of data center hard drives, making it the largest hard drive currently available. The device, which has not yet been named, is based on the company’s mature Mozaic 3+ platform and has been shipping to select customers, most likely hyperscalers like Microsoft or AWS.
The American storage company added a 32 TB Exos M last monthalmost a year after adding its previous largest drive, a 30TB model. Rival Western Digital has a 32TB hard drive in its range but unlike Seagate, uses 11 platters (instead of 10) to achieve this capacity. The same goes for Toshiba; the Japanese firm tested 31TB and 32TB models with 10 and 11 trays.
Tray capacity is something that Seagate has been keen to present as a unique selling point; its press release mentions that it is the only data storage company capable of achieving areal densities of 3.6 TB per platter with scaling to 10 TB in the future. That’s a whopping 100TB hard drive in the works.
60TB hard drives coming soon
Seagate CEO Dave Mosley also revealed that the company has successfully demonstrated platter capacities of over 6TB per platter in laboratory environments. This means that 60TB hard drives are within reach and expected to arrive before the end of the decade (or as in marketing jargon, depending on market conditions).
With this 36 TB model, Seagate is moving away from CMR and SMR to exclusively adopt HAMR technology; According to Seagate, heat-assisted magnetic recording delivers a 25% reduction in cost per TB and a 60% reduction in power consumption per TB. This relentless drive toward cheaper storage is what will keep the hard drive relevant despite the supremacy of SSDs in terms of performance, storage density and power consumption.
122TB SSD are expected to go on sale later this year, targeting the same lucrative data center market, but at different levels. With an estimated cost of $80 per TB, they would remain 4 or 5 times more expensive than a 36 TB hard drive, but would appeal to certain specific customers.
In a statement, a Dell spokesperson also explained that affordable, high-capacity hard drives will play a role in AI workloads, supporting use cases such as recovery-augmented generation ( RAG), inference and agent workflows.
The 36TB hard drive is unlikely to go on sale at retail in the foreseeable future due to enterprise demand; The largest internal hard drive you can buy is a 26TB Western Digital Gold Enterprise hard drive with larger capacities, usually only available through partners or system integrators.
