Seagate’s Breakthrough 30TB+ Hard Drives Ramp Volume, Marking an Inflection Point in the Storage Industry

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in sustainable mass-data storage solutions, today announced a milestone that marks a new era in the storage industry.

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Mozaic 3+ is ramping volume, Mozaic 4+ is in productization phase with good internal results, and Mozaic 5+ has been demonstrated in lab tests. (Graphic: Business Wire)

The company launched the Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform—which incorporates Seagate’s trailblazing implementation of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. The launch heralds unparalleled areal densities of 3TB+ per platter—and a roadmap that will achieve 4TB+ and 5TB+ per platter in the coming years.

The Mozaic 3+ platform powers Seagate’s flagship Exos product family, with newly announced, industry-leading capacity points of 30TB and beyond. Exos 30TB+ products are shipping in volume this quarter to hyperscale cloud customers.

Seagate’s areal density innovation—which increases the number of bits that can be stored on a platter—addresses common industry pain points. Mozaic 3+ enables customers to store more data in the same floor space than ever before. Upgrading from a 16TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drive (the average capacity in large-scale data centers) to an Exos 30TB Mozaic 3+ technology drive effectively doubles capacity in the same footprint.

The platform uses roughly the same material components as PMR hard drives while dramatically increasing capacity, allowing data centers to significantly lower storage acquisition and operational costs—including a 40% improvement in per terabyte power consumption. Mozaic 3+ can also help customers achieve sustainability goals—a top priority for large-scale data centers—by offering a 55% reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte (when comparing a 30TB Mozaic 3+ drive with a traditional 16TB PMR drive).

Seagate is experiencing strong demand from data center customers that are expected to complete qualification of Mozaic 3+ and move into volume ramp by end of this quarter. A leading cloud service provider is focused on ramping of Seagate-provided drives to Mozaic 3+, reflecting their confidence in the technology.

“Seagate is the world’s only hard drive manufacturer with the areal density capability to get to 3TB per platter and with 5TB on the horizon,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate’s CEO. “As AI use cases put a premium on raw data sets, more companies are going to need to store all the data they can. To accommodate the resulting masses of data, areal density matters more than ever.”