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Seagate has shipped the first of its Exos M hard drives, with a roadmap to increase capacity by tens of terabytes.
The storage giant announced earlier this month that the first Exos M drives have landed with customers. While Seagate didn’t reveal exactly who had taken delivery of the drives, it said that it is “currently ramping Exos M to volume shipments… with a leading cloud service provider”.
While customers will be using Exos M drives with a capacity of up to 32 terabytes, Seagate is already sampling 36 terabyte drives. Here, each of the drives’ ten platters featuring 3.6 terabytes of storage. And it looks like it won’t be long until the 3.6 terabyte limit is surpassed: Seagate said it has “a pathway to increasing per-platter capacity to 10TB”.
Seagate said that an Exos M 30 terabyte drive offers 300% more storage for the same data centre footprint, uses 60% less power per terabyte, and costs 25% less per terabyte than its Exos X10 10TB drives.
It’s worth mentioning, however, that the X10s are now several years old and, in Seagate’s words, “a common drive capacity needing an upgrade at data centres today”.
The Exos M drives use Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ HAMR (heat assisted magnetic resonance) technology, which allows more data to be stored on a hard drive without needing a corresponding increase in footprint.
In a recent earnings call, Seagate CEO William Mosley said that the company is in discussions with other cloud and hyperscale providers around rolling out the HAMR drives. He expects that uptake of the technology will grow in the second half of this year.
According to Mosley, developing the drives was not without its challenges, but Seagate believes those issues have now been dealt with and higher-capacity HAMR drives are on the horizon.
“We had great results out of the labs and the first experiments, and then we ran into some problems in productization. We don’t exactly see any of those problems in future productization so it should shorten the cycle,” he said.
“The strain on all the other subsystems, not just the recording subsystem, but all the other subsystems as we go from 30 terabytes to 40 terabytes to 50 terabytes is still great, but we have confidence, and we’ve told people that based on what we see right now… we’re going to drive as aggressively as we can through all those transitions.”
According to IT analyst house Gartner, in 2023 Seagate accounted for around 45% of all hard drive revenue in 2023 and 43% of all hard drive units shipped worldwide.
