For more than two decades, hard drive manufacturer Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology for increasing hard drive density—drives that use tiny lasers to heat up and expand parts of the drive platter, write data, and then shut off to allow the platter to cool and contract, all within less than a nanosecond.
After decades of overly rosy availability predictions, Seagate announced in late 2024 that it was finally delivering HAMR-based drives with capacities of up to 36TB to some datacenter customers. Today, the drives are finally available for end users and individual IT administrators to buy, albeit only in smaller capacities for now. Seagate and other retailers will sell you massive 30TB IronWolf Pro and Exos M hard drives for $600, and 28TB drives for $570. Both drives use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which performs better than the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology sometimes used to increase disk density.
The drives are based on Seagate’s Mosaic 3+ platform, which “incorporates Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR to deliver mass-capacity storage at unprecedented areal densities of 3TB per disk and beyond.”
