Seagate's Storage Roadmap Teases 30TB Drives Coming Soon And 50TB By 2026
Seagate has just released its Q2 2023 financials, and it shared a selection of slides about its storage technology plans among the materials published for investors. In particular, we were interested to note that the iconic storage firm is still busy developing its hard disk drive (HDD) technologies and a new roadmap suggests it will launch 30TB+ HDDs sometime this year, with capacities reaching as high as 50TB+ by 2026. We are, of course, exclusively talking exclusively about Seagate’s 3.5-inch HDDs here.
Seagate has been talking about HAMR drives since way back in 2002, so we hope we are at last approaching prime time for this technology. During the post-results investor call, Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said he was very excited about HAMR progress. He pointed towards the summer as the expected release for the first 30TB HAMR drives.
“The speed of the initial HAMR volume ramp will depend on a number of factors, including product yields and customer qualification time lines,” explained Mosley. Interestingly, Mosley said that the current tech downturn means that factory utilization is lower, and R&D teams have been able to “accelerate cycles of learning around HAMR productization.”
“The speed of the initial HAMR volume ramp will depend on a number of factors, including product yields and customer qualification time lines,” explained Mosley. Interestingly, Mosley said that the current tech downturn means that factory utilization is lower, and R&D teams have been able to “accelerate cycles of learning around HAMR productization.”
While consumers are increasingly going all-SSD, with the blessing of Microsoft, these very high capacity HDDs will find favor among hyperscale data centers and other spaces where sheer volume per dollar trumps outright performance.
