Seagate's latest breakthrough ushers in the age of 55TB or even 69TB hard drives - and it isn't stopping there

• Seagate says it has achieved 6.9TB platters in its laboratory using HAMR technology
• Outgoing 30TB drives use ten 3TB platters for maximum storage
• Intermediate 4TB, 5TB, and 6TB platters will enter production in 2027–2029

Seagate has announced it has successfully developed 6.9TB platters in its laboratory, marking a significant milestone in future hard drive technology.

The company says these experimental platters more than double the capacity of those used in current commercial drives.

Outgoing models, such as Seagate’s 30TB HAMR hard drives, use ten 3TB platters to reach maximum capacity.

HAMR technology and storage density

With the new 6.9TB platters, a single hard drive could achieve between 55TB and 69TB while maintaining the same physical form factor.

This level of storage density has not yet been implemented in consumer or enterprise products, but it demonstrates the physical limits of modern HAMR technology.

The high-capacity platters rely on Seagate’s heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, which applies heat to reduce magnetic coercivity during the write process.

This allows data to be stored more densely than on conventional hard drives.

In current drives, HAMR is combined with techniques such as Mozaic 3+ to reduce the media grain size and improve recording precision.

By applying these advances to larger platters, Seagate has created the potential for drives that could store more than twice the data of existing models without increasing size or weight.

Seagate has indicated that 6.9TB platters will not be used in official products until around 2030.

Before then, the company is developing intermediate platters of 4TB, 5TB, and 6TB, with production expected in 2027, 2028, and 2029, respectively.

Beyond 2031, Seagate projects even larger platters ranging from 7TB to 15TB, suggesting the possibility of petabyte-sized hard drives before 2040.

Despite the rise of SSDs, hard drives remain crucial for large-scale storage due to their superior capacity per dollar and long-term reliability.

The AI boom has intensified demand, resulting in extended backorders for enterprise-class drives.

While consumer-focused storage solutions like USB drives and smaller SSDs are gaining popularity, high-capacity hard drives remain a backbone for data centers and archival storage.

Via TomsHardware

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