Seagate unveils 36TB HAMR hard drive: Mozaic 3+ extended

Seagate on Tuesday stated that its Exos M hard drives, based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology (with capacity points of up to 32TB) has been adopted by a leading cloud service provider, and its production is now ramping up. Additionally, the company said that it had extended its family of Mozaic 3+ platform-based HDDs with a 36TB offering that is now sampling with select customers. The company also said that it had managed to build 6TB HAMR-based platters, enabling 60TB HDDs in the future.

“Seagate continues to lead in areal density, sampling drives on the Exos M platform of up to 36TB today,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate CEO. Also, we are executing on our innovation roadmap, having now successfully demonstrated capacities of over 6TB per disk within our test lab environments.”

Seagate said that its 36TB HDD uses ten 3.6TB platters, though it did not reveal whether it uses shingled magnetic recording or conventional magnetic recording. While HAMR allows for a significant increase hard drive capacity, it is unlikely that Seagate managed to increase platter capacity from 3.0TB to 3.6TB in about a year, so it is likely that the 36TB HDD is an SMR drive.

Seagate’s initial family of Exos M HAMR-based hard drives currently includes a 30TB model using conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and a 32TB model using the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) format. Since large cloud service providers (CSPs) are familiar with how to efficiently manage SMR HDDs, it is not surprising that Seagate’s partner preferred the higher-capacity shingled drives over CMR-based 30TB offerings.

Dell is one of the initial adopters of the Mozaic 3+ platform and plans to incorporate the 32TB Exos M drives into its high-density storage solutions soon.

“As customers build out their AI factories, they need cost-efficient, scalable and flexible storage engineered to reliably handle the most demanding AI workloads,” said Travis Vigil, SVP, ISG Product Management. “Dell PowerScale with Seagate’s HAMR-enabled Mozaic 3+ technology plays a crucial role in supporting AI use cases like retrieval augmented generation (RAG), inferencing and agentic workflows. Together, Dell Technologies and Seagate are setting the standard for industry-leading AI storage innovation.”

Seagate’s 36TB HDDs are now sampling with select clients. It remains to be seen how fast Seagate’s partners among large cloud service providers will qualify 36TB Exos M HDDs, but it is likely that this will happen over 2025, so the company will ramp up production of such drives later this year.

“We are in the midst of a seismic shift in the way data is stored and managed,” said Dave Mosley. “Unprecedented levels of data creation – due to continued cloud expansion and early AI adoption – demand long-term data retention and access to ensure trustworthy data-driven outcomes. From capturing training checkpoints to archiving source-data sets, the more data organizations retain, the more they can validate that their applications are acting as they expect them to – and adjust course as needed.”