A class-action lawsuit was filed against nearly every major hard drive suspension assembly maker, alleging that said companies' price-fixing efforts resulted in higher drive prices for resellers and end users. Should the lawsuit succeed, U.S. resellers and end users who purchased hard drives or computers including them could be eligible for monetary compensation. This suit is a stateside counterpart to the 2019 Canadian class action covering the same matter.

The documents were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and name two groups of defendants, one related to TDK Corporation and the other to NHK Spring. The assemblies produced by these firms are reportedly found in 97% of worldwide HDDs, so it's reasonable enough to assume drives from all major HDD brands are covered by this lawsuit — to wit, Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba.

There is no court date set, and the press release specifically mentions that there's no guarantee that the lawsuit will succeed. However, the case is a direct continuation of a 2019 antitrust lawsuit against the same suspension makers. Over in the northern lands, the Canadian courts have already certified the class action and rejected an appeal against it in 2022. While these facts don't guarantee a payout on either country, they're positive indicators nonetheless.

Suspension assemblies are one of the critical components in a hard drive, as they move the read-write head (the tip of the "needle" you see in hard drive internals), and must be spectacularly precise in both manufacturing and functionality, especially considering the magnetic density of contemporary hard drive platters. It's rather mesmerizing to watch them at work.

The price-fixing scheme allegedly ran from January 2003 to December 31, 2016, raising hard drive manufacturing prices, which were then passed on to customers. As with most class-action lawsuits, end users have the option to drop from the class action and pursue separate legal action against the suspension makers, or stay in it and hope for a cheque at the end of the proceedings. There's a dedicated website for anyone who wants to opt out, an action that can be taken until August 23, 2026.

Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital are the only remaining manufacturers of hard disk drives. They not only continue to produce these storage devices but are also actively advancing them as demand for HDDs rises again. While hard drives from these companies share many similarities, each relies on a different set of underlying technologies — distinct recording methods, actuator designs, platter materials, and magnetic alloys, among others — resulting in markedly different roadmaps. In this story, we examine these roadmaps and attempt to make sense of them.

The state of the HDD market

The amount of data that the world generates is higher than ever now that not only people, but also machines generate well over 400 million terabytes of data every single day, according to estimates made in 2024. Most of that data ends up in data centers, so Gartner predicts that data center storage capacity requirements will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.5% between 2024 and 2029 and will eventually reach 3.19 zettabytes (3.19 million PB, 3.19 billion TB). While a significant portion of that data will be stored on 3D NAND-based solid-state drives, the lion's share will reside on hard disk drives, as HDDs can still offer lower per-TB cost than even the cheapest NAND memory.

Hard drives have been around for nearly 70 years, and over 220 companies have produced HDDs since they were introduced in 1956. In 2026, only three hard drive manufacturers — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — remain on the market, and their supply chains are largely integrated or consolidated, meaning that the industry has largely shrunk from where it used to be a decade ago. Nonetheless, the combination of per-TB cost, storage density, and storage performance that HDDs offer makes them competitive enough, particularly in AI and traditional data centers, which need to store plenty of data that must be accessed relatively quickly and therefore placed 'near online', or nearline.

In fact, over 60% of hard drives shipped today are nearline HDDs, according to Nidec, the world's largest supplier of HDD motors. The remaining circa 40% are consumer and enterprise NAS hard drives, video surveillance HDDs, desktop HDDs (a declining category), external drives, laptop drives (an almost extinct category), and legacy high-performance enterprise HDDs (Toshiba only).

Nidec estimates that 119 million HDDs were shipped in its FY2023 (ending on March 31, 2024), and 125 million hard drives were shipped in its FY2024 (ending March 31, 2025), an indication that unit sales of mechanical storage devices are stable and are growing due to demand from AI and traditional data centers.

Unit sales of HDDs increased in calendar 2025 compared to calendar 2024, according to reports from Hoya (the only maker of glass substrates for HDD platters) and Resonac (the largest independent supplier of HDD platters), though exact numbers are unknown.

"While 2.5-inch substrates declined as forecasted, 3.5-inch substrates achieved double-digit growth, resulting in overall steady performance," said Eiichiro Ikeda, chief executive of Hoya. "Current demand is exceptionally strong and is expected to increase further. Preparations to enhance our supply capacity are also underway."

The road to 100TB and beyond

All HDD makers have adopted energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies, though everyone uses different methods. Seagate is ahead of the pack with its HAMR-based 44TB drive, which is shipping to two leading cloud service providers (CSPs), whereas Toshiba and WD are trailing the leader with their FC-MAMR and ePMR/ePMR2 recording technologies, as they pursue deliberately more cautious strategies.

Note: HDD makers tend to list maximum drive capacities with shingled recording. To that end, even if the table does not explicitly list SMR, presume that range-topping HDDs with leading capacity use shingled recording tech, with all of its pros and cons.

Meanwhile, both Toshiba and WD plan to transition to HAMR in the coming years, though before that, they plan to perfect their HDD platforms and push their existing recording technologies to their absolute limits. Once everyone adopts heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that uses platters made of glass with granular FePt magnetic alloy, the development of their roadmaps will be more or less consistent and introduce HDDs with a circa 100TB capacity by around 2030 – 2031, though some roadmap slides are more optimistic, whereas others are more cautious.

Seagate: All-in on HAMR

All HDD makers tend to experiment with various recording technologies, platters, and heads. Just like others, Seagate has experimented with all kinds of EAMR methods, including microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), but publicly it bet everything on HAMR as the most capable one.

Before Seagate finally shipped its Mozaic 3+ Exos HDDs in Q1 2024, it spent over a decade evolving HAMR from lab demonstrations (FePt + laser writing) through prototype drives and hyperscaler trials. Starting from around 2016, the company repeatedly said 'next year' for high-volume HAMR-based HDD production, only to roll out the same statement the year after.

Between 2020 and 2023, Seagate's HAMR rollout ran into a series of well-known hiccups that repeatedly pushed back commercialization despite earlier aggressive timelines. The company had originally targeted volume shipments of 20TB HAMR drives around 2020, but persistent issues, such as near-field transducer (NFT) reliability, iron platinum (FePt) media durability under repeated heating, and manufacturing yield, slowed progress. These challenges made HAMR technically viable but difficult to produce at scale, which led to multiple delays and extended customer qualification cycles.

To solve these challenges, Seagate had to develop its 2^nd Generation HAMR platform, which it eventually named Mozaic 3+, which went into high-volume production in 2024. But now that Seagate has mastered everything that accompanies HAMR, it can introduce new capacity points, qualify them, and ramp up production of new HAMR-based HDDs fairly quickly. For example, the company is now shipping its 44TB Mozaic 4-based drives to select clients and plans to expand availability in 2027. Meanwhile, Seagate intends to start qualification shipments of 50TB HDDs featuring the next-generation Mozaic 5 platform in late 2027.

Following 50TB HDDs in 2028, 60 TB HDDs by 2029 – 2030, and plans for 80+ TB drives in 2031. With ~100TB HDDs, Seagate intends to adopt high-anisotropic ordered granular FePt (FePt L1₀ phase) magnetic alloy, which will give it a further boost to set new areal density records and ultimately produce HDDs with capacities beyond 100TB.

Toshiba: Stretching MAMR (almost) to the limit

Toshiba is the smallest of all HDD makers, so it has a very calculated strategy that is designed to address parts of the market that are not served by its rivals and to derisk everything as much as possible.

To that end, Toshiba's HDD roadmap is built around a conservative, step-by-step scaling strategy focused on flux-controlled microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) with some HAMR-based HDDs due in 2026 – 2027 being test vehicles, rather than high-volume products. The company's roadmap no longer lists microwave assisted switching microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAS-MAMR) it envisioned as an intermediate step between FC-MAMR and HAMR a few years ago.

For now, Toshiba has its M12-series 28TB FC-MAMR-based 11-platter drive with conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and is sampling shingled FC-MAMR HDDs based on the same platform with 30TB – 34 TB capacities. The new M12 hard drives rely on glass platters, but with traditional cobalt platinum (CoCrPt) magnetic alloy, which once again highlights Toshiba's step-by-step approach to adopting new technologies.

Looking forward, Toshiba's roadmap scales capacity primarily through more platters (up to 12), and continued FC-MAMR improvements targeting ~40TB drives around 2027. While the company intends to launch HAMR-based HDDs too, the 40TB capacity point will likely be limited to drives for select customers rather than true workhorses. More capacious HAMR-based HDDs are due late this decade.

In essence, Toshiba is taking a lower-risk, hybrid path: maximize MAMR and mechanical scaling first, then transition to HAMR only when necessary for the next major density jump.

Western Digital: Coexisting ePMR and HAMR

After abandoning MAMR technology in 2017 and having concentrated on energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) since then, WD expects its ePMR and ePMR 2-based hard drives to co-exist with HAMR for years to come. Furthermore, as ePMR and HAMR HDDs are very different, this means that the company isn't pursuing a dual-track, like Toshiba, but a multi-track roadmap aimed at maximizing yields and derisking all the technology transitions.

This year, the company's flagship 40TB offerings will rely on ePMR with SMR technology and feature 11 aluminum platters with cobalt platinum (CoCrPt) magnetic alloy. To squeeze in 11 aluminum disks and avoid using glass platters, WD had to squeeze the internal mechanics of the drive.

At the same time, Western Digital plans to start the transition to HAMR, with the first commercial 40TB and 44TB HAMR drives entering volume production around 2027, following hyperscaler qualification. Since WD's HAMR drives use edge-emitting lasers to briefly heat the iron-platinum (FePt) layer on the platters to its Curie point — where its magnetic characteristics shift — and temporarily lower coercivity to write the data, the HDD platters must be made of glass (or glass ceramic, though this will be used sometimes next decade), not aluminum, as it may degrade or deform over time. However, based on a comment made by the chief executive of Hoya, the only glass substrate maker for HDD platters in the world, it does not look like WD plans to use glass platters in high volumes for at least a couple of years, which in turn suggests a relatively slow production ramp.

"Starting in the latter half of FY2026 [which begins on October 1, 2026], shipments [of glass substrates] to the second customer will begin in addition to our current primary customer," said Eiichiro Ikeda, chief executive of Hoya. "We expect volume to increase substantially in FY2027 [April 1, 2027]. Equipment arrangements for FY2027, specifically for the second customer, have already been decided. Regarding volume beyond FY2028 [April 1, 2028], we are currently analyzing the situation, taking into account not only the increase from the second customer but also the movements of a potential third customer. Capital expenditures will be determined based on that schedule."

Seagate seems to be the primary producer of HDD platters based on glass substrates for its HAMR HDDs, Resonac (former Showa Denko) is catching up with its glass platters for Toshiba (and Seagate), whereas WD is the world's third maker of HDD media that is about to start using glass substrates.

WD expects to use both ePMR + SMR and HAMR technologies till at least 60TB capacity sometimes in 2028 or 2029, though it looks like proven ePMR + SMR will prevail in its shipments in the coming years. Yet, looking further out, WD's roadmap becomes aggressively HAMR-driven after 60TB: capacities are expected to scale to ~100TB in 2029 – 2030, enabled by higher areal density and drive architecture that supports up to 14 platters.

In short, Western Digital's strategy is a bridge-and-accelerate model — extend ePMR as far as possible, then rapidly scale with HAMR once the transition is justified. Beyond that, the company is targeting 140TB+ drives in the 2030s, which will require a transition to even more advanced media concepts, such as ordered granular and bit-patterned media, once HAMR on granular media reaches its limits.

Beyond capacity: High-performance and energy-efficient HDDs

In addition to increasing the capacities of their hard drives, Seagate and WD intend to increase the bandwidth and I/O performance of HDDs.

Seagate has offered its Mach.2-series hard drives with two actuators that double the per-TB IOPS performance of its drives, which is important for many clients that need to maintain their quality-of-service (QoS) specification, something that is getting increasingly hard to do amid growing storage density. Going forward, Seagate intends to increase the number of actuators, though the company expects to reveal its multi-actuator HDD roadmap in late May, when the company has an event for analysts and investors.

WD plans to split its HDD lineup into High-Performance drives (High-Bandwidth and Dual Pivot) and Power-Optimized drives, each tailored for different data center workloads. High-performance HDDs aim to increase bandwidth and/or I/O performance of a single drive with a roadmap towards 8× bandwidth and 4× I/O scaling.

Among the methods used to increase performance are using more than one head to read or write data at the same time, installing another fully independent actuator on a separate pivot that has its own set of heads, and therefore acting like another HDD. Dual-Pivot HDDs are currently in the lab and are targeted to become available in 2028.

In contrast, Power-Optimized drives target 'active cold' storage tiers, where data must remain accessible but does not require high performance. These drives reduce random I/O activity and are engineered to cut power consumption by roughly 20% to lower operating costs in large-scale deployments while offering predictable performance. Such HDDs will be positioned against 3D QLC SSDs starting in 2027. WDl expects these drives to be used to store massive datasets — such as AI logs and checkpoints — at a lower total cost of ownership.

Summary

The HDD market has shrunk from over 200 drive makers in the 1980s to just three in 2026. These three companies — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — tend to compete on capacity and performance, but they tend to do so using a completely different set of technologies, even despite the fact that they use some industry-standard components (HDD platter substrates, motors, etc.).

On the technology front, Seagate is all-in on HAMR; the company is already shipping 44TB drives and targeting 100TB-class products in the early 2030s. By contrast, Toshiba is taking a cautious, step-by-step approach, stretching MAMR and mechanical scaling before introducing HAMR later this decade. Western Digital is arguably the most cautious of the HDD makers, pursuing a multi-track strategy, which includes extending ePMR to 60TB, increasing the number of platters per drive to 14, all while gradually ramping production of HAMR-based HDDs, and targeting to launch 100TB+ drives around 2030.

Beyond capacity, both Seagate and Western Digital are also rethinking HDD performance with multi-actuator and dual-pivot designs to boost bandwidth and I/O performance to make HDD-based storage systems more competitive with SSD-powered systems. In addition, WD is also developing power-optimized drives to cut energy use for 'active cold' storage.

In general, 70 years after inception, the HDD industry is alive and kicking. Three companies are competing intensely to achieve higher storage density, higher efficiency, and predictable performance while retaining competitive per-TB cost compared to solid-state drives.

In a world of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, the supply of computer hardware can barely meet demand, and at this point, long-term supply agreements (LTAs) become compulsory. When it comes to storage — both hard disk drives and solid-state drives — LTAs now span from three to five years, depending on the device. While some may argue that now all the supply will get to large customers, such agreements with guaranteed offtake may actually be good for consumers.

Up to five year LTAs

When it comes to SSDs, long-term supply agreements now span five years, according to Sandisk.

"The duration of this agreement varies, with the longest contract extending to five years," said Luis Visoso, chief financial officer of SanDisk, in an earnings call with analysts and investors. "In aggregate, volume commitments increased during the life of the contracts with quarterly commitments and a combination of fixed and variable pricing. […] These agreements are tailored to meet the needs of our customers and, in aggregate, provide us with demand certainty at financials that we expect will be consistent with our fiscal fourth quarter guidance."

Something similar applies to hard drives, though LTA visibility of Seagate and Western Digital is a bit shorter. In the case of Seagate, the company is even talking about bespoke storage systems.

"We have exabyte-scale supply agreements in place with nearly all major cloud and hyperscale customers, with nearline capacity almost fully allocated through calendar 2027," said William Mosley, chief executive of Seagate, in the company's most recent conference call. "At the same time, we are finalizing build-to-order contracts with these customers through the end of fiscal 2027, which defines specific configuration and pricing. Our value-based pricing approach enables customers to plan with confidence while contributing to sustained profit growth for Seagate, and we are actively engaged in strategic planning discussions now reaching into calendar 2028 and beyond."

The same applies to Western Digital. "Our long-term visibility continues to improve, with the duration of our agreements now extending into calendar year 2028 and calendar year 2029," said Irving Tan, chief executive of Western Digital.

Clear visibility

For years, storage has been considered a commodity, so now these long-term supply agreements give storage makers unusually clear visibility into real demand, which enables them to scale production in a far more disciplined way. SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital can now align NAND wafer starts, HDDs, HDD media output, and controller supply with multi-year volume commitments instead of reacting to short-term market demand. On the one hand, this reduces the risk of overbuilding capacity; on the other hand, it may ensure a lack of underinvesting ahead of demand increases.

With guaranteed demand secured using multi-year contracts, the aforementioned three companies are also more willing to commit billions of dollars to the expansion of fabs, assembly lines, and next-generation technologies such as higher-layer NAND and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). What is even more important, these investments are aimed at confirmed demand rather than speculative forecasts, which in turn enables these companies to look beyond guaranteed demand, which in turn means speculative forecasts on the consumer market. Whether or not they are going to do that remains to be seen.

That being said, expansion remains inherently gradual. New 3D NAND memory capacity —like any semiconductor fab — usually takes years to ramp, and HDD advancements depend on incremental media and read/write head production increases usually at third parties like Hoya, Resonac (former Showa Denko), and TDK, which means supply will tighten before new capacity fully materializes.

To sum up, while a clear visibility of demand gives Sandisk, Seagate, and Western Digital more ability to spend, we have yet to see how everything works out.

External 3.5-inch-based hard drives for backup and expanded storage have been common for decades (I brought one with me to college in 2000). But they typically required large laptop-style external power bricks, were often painfully slow, and were prone to random data-eating failure (ask me how I know). Seagate’s game-focused FireCuda X Vault drive (available in 8TB and 20TB options; we tested the 8TB) attempts to mitigate some of those past frustrations using a single USB-C connection that also powers the drive.

It’s also faster than portable hard drives (like the WD My Passport I tested in 2024), delivering a little under 200 MB/s writes in our real-world 50GB file transfer test. And if data loss concerns you, the FireCuda X Vault, like most Seagate drives, ships with two years of the company’s in-house Data Recovery Service. Of course, sub-200 MB/s speeds aren’t going to compete with even mid-range SSD these days, and at roughly 7.75x 2.1 x 5.25 inches and 2.75 pounds, it’s much larger than something like Sandisk’s solid-state Desk Drive (which I also tested at 8TB). But that 8TB desk-bound SSD is currently selling for $740, while Seagate’s 8TB spinning-platter Vault has an MSRP of $269. Is the Seagate Firecuda X Vault (which, apart from its built-in RGB, doesn’t look all that different from external 3.5-inch external drives I owned in the early 2000s) a smart storage option for gamers in 2026? Let’s walk through its features, put it through our external storage testing, and find out if it deserves a spot on our list of the best external hard drives and SSDs.

Specifications

Design and features of the Seagate FireCuda X Vault

The Seagate FireCuda X Vault looks and feels a lot like any other external 3.5-inch external drive, perhaps with a bit more gamer edginess, thanks to some plastic slats designed to look like cooling fins and a wrap-around top surface with some cutouts to let the RGB shine through. The entire outer shell is plastic, save for a large foam pad on the bottom that’s there to prevent the drive sliding around on your desk (and also to hide the access screws underneath). The drive doesn't exactly scream premium storage, but it doesn’t feel or look cheap, either.

The sole port, which is USB-C, is housed on the rear center. And because this is a bus-powered drive, you’ll need to use a port (and a cable) that’s capable of delivering 15W of power. That might mean plugging the drive into the back of your PC if you’re using a desktop. And considering most modern systems don’t have more than two or three native USB-C ports, you might have to pick up a powered USB-C hub if you have other peripherals that need those ports.

The drive ships with a 0.5-meter (1.64 feet) removable USB-C-to-USB-C cable.

Software on the Seagate FireCuda X Vault

Seagate is going hard on software trials with the FireCuda X Vault. A small pamphlet in the box gives you access to a 1-month trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and two months of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Pro. While these are, of course, designed to suck you into an ongoing service, it is roughly $100 worth of software access if you were to pay for it yourself.

The drive itself ships empty, save for a shortcut to an online registration page and a PDF of the drive’s warranty.

You can also grab Seagate’s Toolkit software, which provides simple but straightforward controls for backing up, mirroring folders, and granular controls of the RGB lighting on the top of the drive. I also appreciate that the drive was recognized by Windows Dynamic Lighting, which let me customize the RGB well before I downloaded Seagate’s Toolkit.

Comparison Products

We haven’t tested many external spinning-platter hard drives in recent years, save for WD’s 6TB portable hard drive (based around a much smaller 2.5-inch hard drive), which is also bus-powered but still uses the archaic USB 3 Micro-B port. But Seagate also sent along its also-new One Touch HDD (available in 8TB, 20TB, and 24TB models, for $10 less than the FireCuda X Vault and competing capacities) drive, which is a bit slimmer (and seen above, left) and also gets power and data over USB-C.

To round out our charts and see what you can get in other form factors, we’ve included Sandisk’s 8TB Desk Drive (which is almost 3x the price, but much faster). We also tossed in Samsung’s slow (for an SSD) T5 Evo drive, as well as a fast flash drive, Kingston’s 1TB DataTraveler Max.

The solid-state options are, for the most part, much faster, as well as generally a lot smaller. But thanks to AI-driven price hikes in the past several months, you’ll pay a whole lot more for 8TB of SSD storage – even though hard drives are also more expensive than they used to be. Generally, unless price really is no option these days, if you need 8TB of storage or more (especially from a single drive), you’re going to opt for a hard drive.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Of course, the SanDisk desktop SSD and the Kingston flash drive beat the hard drives here (and in most tests). Seagate’s FireCuda drive manages to beat out the less-than-speedy Samsung T5 portable SSD, and WD’s smaller portable hard drive. But interestingly, it’s the Seagate One Touch that tops all the hard drives on this chart.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50 GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

In this real-world transfer test, Seagate’s FireCuda drive takes its expected spot atop the other hard drives in our test pool. But Samsung’s T5 is faster, as are the other solid-state drives here. Still, it’s good to see the FireCuda landing around the 200 MB/s read and write range, which is about what we would expect for a performance-focused consumer hard drive here in 2026.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

This sequential synthetic test is a sort of best-case test for SSDs, so you can see that those pricier-per-capacity drives are much faster here. But interestingly, we again see the Seagate FireCuda drive landing below its One Touch hard drive sibling on this test. Given the reverse was true (and there was a wider margin) in DiskBench above, it’s safe to say the FireCuda drive will be slightly faster in real-world file transfers, despite the numbers here.

Again, this synthetic small-file test sees the Seagate One Touch doing a little better than the FireCuda drive, but the two are effectively tied, especially when it comes to writes. One thing that’s clear from all these tests is that, while a smaller portable drive might be more convenient, the WD My Passport (with an internal 2.5-inch drive) is significantly slower than the newer, larger, Seagate drives (based around internal 3.5-inch drives).

Bottom Line

Seagate’s FireCuda X Vault is a bus-powered 3.5-inch drive, available in 8TB and 20TB options, aimed at gamers with some RGB lighting (which thankfully doesn’t require additional control software in Windows 11). It performs noticeably better than smaller portable hard drives we’ve tested, and is slightly faster than some other 3.5-inch alternatives.

Apart from the lighting and a trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, there isn’t much particularly gaming-specific about it. But if you’re looking for a place to store your streaming footage or a massive game library, it does the job while costing a lot less than a comparative spacious SSD. Its primary downside is also its primary convenience. One USB-C cable can power the drive while providing data access. That’s great for anyone who has dealt with external drive power bricks in the past. But how many USB-C ports do you have that are capable of delivering this drive’s 15W power requirements? If you plan to keep this drive plugged in, you might also need to invest in a capable dock or USB hub with power delivery and multiple USB-C ports.

Looking for a good workstation SSD? Seagate apparently asked the same question of the market when it decided to design the FireCuda 530R. It’s a twist on the original FireCuda 530, which uses the same controller, with a bigger emphasis on reliability. As it so turns out, the drive does deliver, and it’s no slouch for gaming or everyday tasks, either. It’s also fast enough to hold you over until the consumer SSD market recovers.

Seagate is no newcomer to reliable drives. The company has spent a lot of time working on its mechanical hard drives, offering three years of data recovery services for the best models. This also applies to some of its SSDs, and that list includes the 530R. It’s usually tough to recover data from a dead SSD, but if the data hasn’t been overwritten – and in most cases, drive failures happen in a way that doesn’t involve the flash or data directly – it’s possible it can be salvaged. That alone is a big selling point for this drive, but Seagate also offers exceptional TBW endurance limits at all capacities. The drive also works with the excellent SeaTools 5 diagnostic software. To put it simply, this drive is designed to last or at least give you perceived peace of mind.

There is a caveat or two with that, though. The drive’s controller – Phison’s E18 – had a string of bad luck with an alleged Microsoft Windows update gone wrong, which actually doesn’t apply to the 530R but might get attached in searches. This controller also had a stale data bug discovered late in the controller’s lifetime, a problem since many manufacturers decided not to patch the firmware. In both cases, these are Phison issues, and Seagate has generally been pretty alert about these things. It was one of the few manufacturers to work with Phison’s I/O+ DirectStorage-optimized firmware, so we know the company is proactive. We want to make sure to get out ahead of that in this review because, contrary to anything those events might suggest, this is actually a drive made for enthusiasts who value reliability and consistent performance.

Seagate FireCuda 530R Specifications

The Seagate FireCuda 530R, not to be confused with the earlier FireCuda 530, is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. It lacks the 8TB SKU of its predecessor. At the time of review, it’s priced at $175.74, $237.49, and $427.49. This makes it an exceptional deal at any capacity, as it has DRAM and its prices rival inferior DRAM-less options like the TeamGroup MP44. It’s best at 2TB and 4TB, if you can find it, but even the price at 1TB is quite good.

This drive is rated for up to 7,400 / 7,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,300K / 1,300K random read and write IOPS. These specifications are a little odd because write performance goes down with capacity, and the IOPS are identical for reads and writes across all SKUs. We would expect the 2TB SKU to provide peak performance. However, this doesn’t really matter much as the performance is good at any capacity.

The main thing that stands out is the IOPS, which are considerably higher than other drives with the Phison E18 controller, including Seagate’s older drives, which, along with the other performance specifications suggests this is an enthusiast or workstation drive. It’s worth emphasizing this because at first glance it’s easy to confuse this drive as some sort of FireCuda 530 successor when it’s more of a specialized variant. The IOPS rating makes this more apparent, but the specs across the entire capacity range reinforce that this isn’t a budget drive.

Also unusual is Seagate’s warranty for the drive. While the five-year duration is typical, the rated write endurance is not. The TBW endurance ranges from 1,100 to 1262.5 of data writes per TB of capacity, which is roughly double that of other drives. If you’re having flashbacks to the FireCuda 520, which had very high TBW, you’re not alone. Seagate’s original FireCuda 530 also had high TBW, but we have to take the competition into consideration – that is, TBW is relative to other drives on the market. The 530R is in a good place here. Seagate also bundles a 3-year Rescue Services, or Rescue Data Recovery Services to be precise, warranty with the drive, which is exceptional for extra peace of mind.

We noted in recent Seagate SSD reviews, like for the FireCuda 540, that Seagate has done a good job with documentation and also with making drives that feel good for workstations and heavy use. Usually, you want high TBW with these use cases, which makes the 530R potentially interesting for enthusiasts. That said, the 530R has a mixed reputation in the community, and it uses less common flash. This reputation is based partially on Phison’s E18 stale data read bug – essentially, read latency could sometimes spike on older data, which is fixed in newer firmware offered by some manufacturers, including Seagate. Another problem was a supposed Windows Update bug, which ended up going down a winding path to the truth, which could cause data corruption. This also should not be a factor with the 530R today, but certainly, these mixed signals can create some anxiety.

That said, the drive’s older hardware is more of a peak performance or power efficiency problem than an endurance one. The 530R has been optimized for massive writes and heavy use cases, as previously stated. But it’s worth reviewing the drive’s performance consistency – especially with sustained writes – before making a judgment call. Secondary to this would be power efficiency, but that tends to be less of a concern for power users.

Seagate FireCuda 530R: A Closer Look

The Seagate FireCuda 530R can come both with and without a heatsink. We’re lucky enough to have both for review. The drive is rated for 3.3V / 3.0A or ~9.9W, which matches our expectations – Seagate’s average load rating for the 4TB SKU is 8.9W, and our sample peaks at 8.8W from the SMART information. This is relatively high compared to what we expect from newer hardware – controllers and flash have both gotten more efficient – but is well within a tolerable envelope.

We would recommend a heatsink, whether the one you can get with the drive or some other solution. Make sure you get one that can handle a double-sided drive, and if you’re using the drive bare in a laptop, make sure that laptop doesn’t require a single-sided solution. As for the bundled heatsink, we’ve reviewed it before on a Phison E18-equipped drive. See our Seagate PS5 Game Drive review for more.

This is a double-sided drive with an SSD controller, two DRAM packages for cache memory, and eight NAND flash packages. The controller is the Phison E18, which we’ve come to know well over the years. It has eight flash channels and DRAM for the best performance. The DRAM is SK hynix H5AN8GNDJR-XNC, which is 8Gb, or 1GB, of 16-bit DDR4, making for a total of 2GB. This matches the optimal 1GB:1TB DRAM:NAND capacity ratio.

The flash is Kioxia 162-Layer BiCS6 TLC using smaller 512Gb, or 64GB, NAND dies. This means four dies per 2Tb package for a total of thirty-two dies. This is an optimal amount as performance peaks at around four dies per plane. Further, this is a four-plane flash variant that increases throughput with a higher level of parallelization. This is a very good choice if you’re building a workstation drive, and Seagate has not skimped anywhere that we can see. We don’t have the 4TB to test, but it’s possible the 1Tb die variant could be used there, but the impact is not significant as it would have the same die count as we do here. For those curious, this is not enterprise or eTLC with additional endurance, but neither is it lower-grade flash that’s passed on to the consumer. It’s rated for the full 3,000 program-erase cycles.

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Comparison Products

The Seagate FireCuda 530R is a workstation-class drive, so we aren't pulling any punches. The only DRAM-less drive on this list is the Biwin Black Opal NV7400, which uses decent hardware for its class of drive. We have the high-end, class-leading Samsung 990 Pro and the WD Black SN850X – or SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 850X – at the very top of the DRAM-equipped drives. The Crucial T500 also fits at the top despite having only four rather than eight flash channels, as it does have DRAM paired with newer flash. Direct competitors to the 530R include the Adata Legend 960 Max, the Netac NV7000, the TeamGroup A440 Pro, and the Inland Gaming Performance Plus.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive, and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

The FireCuda 530R ends up smack dab in the middle. 3DMark is a rough gauge of game-loading performance, more than game-running performance, and you can get a feel for the drive’s overall responsiveness just by looking at the latency results. While one drive to the next you won’t see any real FPS change, game loading times can matter in certain games, especially if they are heavy with mods. The 530R’s 43µs latency is in a good spot for a gaming drive even though it’s not inherently designed for gaming. It will feel very responsive.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry-standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

On the other hand, we do expect better things from the drive in PCMark. This drive should work well in a workstation and its performance, at just over 620 MB/s for bandwidth, is reasonable. This is enough to drive your VMs and metadata-heavy apps and the 530R’s consistency is more important. We originally liked the Legend 960 Max quite a bit here but it’s hard to find that drive now. Top-tier drives like the T500 and 990 Pro still stand on top, too. The 530R is good enough, beating the Black SN850X and likely keeping ahead of any DRAM-less solution. It also beats older drives with the same controller like the Gaming Performance Plus and A440 Pro Special.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

Again, this is no gaming drive, but it will work great in the PS5. We would prefer a single-sided drive or one that pulls less power, but this works. The heatsink should keep it cool enough if you choose to go this way. We would also recommend this drive over ultra-cheap ones – random name, random hardware, DRAM-less fungibles – if you are someone who keeps your consoles forever.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

Good copy performance is requisite of a decent workstation SSD. The FireCuda 530R manages over 2 GB/s which is an excellent result. The T500 is faster but it also has post-cache issues with write consistency. As a result, the 530R is probably the best in this list, which puts it near or at the top of Gen 4 drives. We would also note that this is faster than the original FireCuda 530 – which has the same hardware as Gaming Performance Plus and A440 Pro here – even when accounting for any platform variation

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

We look at ATTO for performance consistency and the FireCuda 530R delivers. It has a small dip with 256KiB reads but this is normal and is reflected in other drives like the A440 Pro. CDM’s sequential results are not as good, specifically QD1 read performance is lower than we’d like for a real-world workload. That said, this drive is designed for write-heavier workloads so this makes sense. Random read latency is good but not great, but as expected random write latency is fantastic. This drive is a good pick for many home lab tasks and is fast enough for a daily driver, as well.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states, including the steady-state write performance.

The FireCuda 530R first writes in a single-bit, ultra-fast pSLC mode at over 6.8 GB/s for more than 32 seconds. This delivers a 221GB cache which is in the sweet spot between too large and too small. Having a smaller cache can improve steady state performance or write consistency while larger caches are better for handling typical bursty environments. Usually you want smaller for workstation workloads and larger for daily consumer ones. Seagate needs to sell this drive to both camps, so the compromise makes some sense.

It’s almost certainly designed very specifically the way it is to hit the maximum sustainable speed possible in a post-cache state. How can you tell? Well, the performance drop after the cache is usually the drive entering a native flash or TLC mode for writes. This writes directly to the flash and the pSLC emptying takes lower priority to incoming writes. If the drive can’t keep up it eventually hits a much slower “folding” state where it has to wait for the cache to move data over and free up space. This is not ideal for a workstation drive. The 530R doesn’t hit this final state in our testing and instead remains flat in TLC mode at almost 1.56 GB/s. This is by design. Having consistent long-tail write performance makes for an easier time for multimedia work that has set speed requirements and it also means this drive would work well in a fast enclosure, and these are realistic workloads.

1.56 GB/s sounds slow until you realize it can maintain that and is consistent in doing so. While there are Gen 3 drives that get close to that, and certainly Gen 4 and 5 drives that can exceed it, it’s fast enough to handle most expected workloads for as long as they take. It’s a good sweet spot that allows Seagate to retain a larger cache. The flash is capable of writing faster and so a drive like this with say, no pSLC cache at all, would be faster and more consistent for long workloads, but there are benefits to having a write cache even with drives that lean enthusiast.

It’s best to cache random writes in pSLC mode and this drive performs very well with small I/O there. This can improve flash endurance because writes are combined before being written sequentially to the native flash, reducing write amplification. All of this demonstrates to us that Seagate very specifically wanted this behavior. We can look at drives like the Legend 960 Max and A440 Pro to see that those two have a faster middle state than the 530R. The A440 Pro ends up with the same steady state speed as the 530R but is far less consistent. The Legend 960 Max handles itself better, although this is partly due to it having better-quality flash than the A440 Pro. The 530R is slower on the whole but you are also getting excellent endurance and consistent performance in return.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

Is the 530R efficient? Yes, but not notably so. Newer drives – or drives with newer hardware, at least – can be more efficient. The original high-end 990 Pro and Black SN850X remain more efficient as well, although the 530R improves upon the Gaming Performance Plus and A440 Pro. It also outpaces the Legend 960 Max which we liked as a workstation drive back when it was available. The truth is, a drive like this will struggle to be more efficient as it needs a full eight flash channels and the presence of DRAM. Some of the workloads it’s optimized for are going to be less efficient, too. To stick to our testing, though, its efficiency is average overall but above average for its specific class.

We were worried that this might make the drive run hot. As it turns out, the component surface area of this drive – 11 total main packages, 12 if you count the PMIC – enables it to dissipate heat pretty effectively, with or without a heatsink. This is a workstation-targeted SSD so its throttling temperature target of 86°C is moderate but we didn’t even get within 30 degrees of that without a heatsink.

Adding a heatsink lowered the temperature another 6°C, a small amount, which tells us that the drive is thermally bottlenecked by its ability to transfer heat. This is a good thing in the sense it means Seagate paid attention to heat output and the drive should be good to go even without a heatsink. However, using the heatsink puts it into a space where it’s not going to overheat unless the environment is atrocious. Seagate likely chose the overall layout and package form factors to get this result, and the moderate TLC performance level supports this as well. If you are buying this for a workhorse that will see a lot of writes, it will stay cooler.

We think that’s important to emphasis, again, because this drive has been perhaps unfairly reviewed and critiqued by some. It shouldn’t be compared to normal consumer SSDs, for one, but more importantly the drama over its reliability is ironic given that Seagate clearly spent time to make it reliable everywhere you look: high TBW, three years of data recovery, a smooth caching scheme, excellent heat dissipation, a bundled heatsink, good software tools, etc. We’re underlining this again because if we were going to have a change of heart it would be in this section, but the 530R has proven to be more efficient than expected and has assuaged any potential fears.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications, such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus, disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Seagate FireCuda 530R Bottom Line

The Seagate FireCuda 530R is a surprisingly solid drive. I say surprisingly because it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention and what it has gotten has leaned towards the negative. In fact, this is a drive that Seagate clearly put thought into with a design that makes sense even in this troubled SSD market. Support is solid with tools, data recovery services, and a high amount of warrantied writes. It uses a mature platform that, while it had its share of problems, is a robust framework for an SSD of this type. By this type, we mean workstation, as most of what we see from it indicates it’s best in that type of storage role. This means that consistency should be valued more than raw synthetic returns.

That’s not to say it’s not a great everyday drive. It’s cool-running enough that, with or without the heatsink, it should work fine in most systems, and it’s great for the PS5, too. The pSLC cache is large enough for an everyday driver, and all-around performance shows no real weaknesses. For heavier workloads, it does pretty well, and the flat post-PSLC write performance is consistent enough that this would be happy for NAS duty or content creation. We do think Seagate is positioning this more towards that end, but the pricing at the time of review means it’ll make do for anything. The three years of data recovery services are just icing on the cake.

Its plus sides are also some of its down sides, as the hardware does feel older at times. Newer drives have better read performance and potentially much better power efficiency. A single-sided drive design is also favored these days. Still, the biggest weak point of this drive is past problems with the Phison controller. It got mixed up in not just one but two public fiascos – a supposed Windows Update corruption bug plus the Phison E18 controller’s stale data issue – which is unfortunate. Seagate was one of the few companies to push to get the firmware update for testing and was also one of the few manufacturers that put out the special DirectStorage firmware before that. We think that Phison could shoulder more of the blame here, but to avoid further drama, we’ll just say that the 530R does not deserve to be maligned. It’s actually a respectable drive that is worth a second look if you happened to discount it in the past.

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While Seagate has its hands full with the current memory situation, at least it’s nice enough to still give us some drives to explore. The FireCuda X1070 is the latest drive from the company, and it feels specialized in a way different from the FireCuda 530R, a drive we’ve also looked at recently. This is a budget drive with non-budget trappings that feels a little bit steadier than the ubiquitous Kingston NV3. Its hardware is decidedly not the fastest out there, but with this level of support, Seagate is not treating it like a throwaway SKU either.

Memory has become the most expensive part of your build, whether it’s for main memory, video memory, or storage. However, SSDs tend to be a good place to skimp, as you can rotate games out and use mechanical HDDs or cloud storage to fill the gaps. Yet they are still an essential part of any build, and Seagate hopes to address this in part with the FireCuda X1070. While the FireCuda 530R feels more high-end and directed at enthusiasts, the FireCuda X1070 covers something closer to the entry-level market and can be good in laptops, desktops, and the PS5. What helps the drive stand apart is its full five-year warranty – with three years of data recovery service – and decent TBW for a QLC-based drive. This is something that can get you through the memory price hump, as it were.

Seagate FireCuda X1070 Specifications

The Seagate FireCuda X1070 is available in the most popular capacities: 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Pricing shared with us at the time of review comes out to $239.99, $459.99, and $829.99 for the three SKUs. Manufacturers will set MSRPs like this, but even in the best of times, these are weak guidelines. Right now, fair prices for each SKU would be in the $150-$165, $265-$275, and $440-$460 ranges. This is using the Biwin NV7200, the Kingston NV3, the Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite, and the Silicon Power UD90 for baselining. These drives are roughly in the same class, recognizing that the latter two have seen changes in hardware over time. The FireCuda X1070’s flash will often put it ahead of variations found in the wild, but drives with comparable 232-layer flash, like the NV7200, directly compete. It likely has an edge over the average NV3, though.

Performance is respectable at up to 7,200 / 6,500 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 900K / 1,000K random read and write IOPS. The 1TB model is the weakest, but its performance as a whole is more than adequate. Peak performance is at 2TB, and that’s also where the drive will be most efficient if performance is actually pushed. Seagate offers a full five-year warranty for the drive with three years of data recovery services included. The drive is also rated for 600TB of writes per TB, which is the standard amount for TLC-based drives. Given that this drive is using QLC flash, that’s actually high. Some users do look at TBW and, nine times out of ten, QLC will have around half the rated endurance of TLC, but that’s not the case here. For some, that’s enough to keep it in the running.

Seagate FireCuda X1070 Software and Accessories

Seagate has a plethora of downloads available, but the most important are DiscWizard and SeaTools 5. DiscWizard is used to back up and secure your data, while SeaTools is an SSD toolbox-type application to help manage your drive’s health. This is standard in the industry, but Seagate does have some of the better software around. Seagate is also including one month of Xbox Ultimate Game Pass and two months of Adobe Creative Cloud Pro with this drive. The former is probably of more use for a budget drive like the FireCuda X1070.

Seagate FireCuda X1070: A Closer Look

The Seagate FireCuda X1070 is single-sided at all capacities, which makes sense for a drive of this caliber. Budget drives tend to pull less power and are suitable for laptops, the PS5, and other systems that might not have the cooling capacity of a high-end desktop. The drive is rated for 3.3V / 2.0A, which pegs it below 7W. Seagate itself lists the expected active power draw to average around 4.7W for the 2TB SKU. In SMART, the drive reports 5.5W for its non-idle modes. Our peak consumption is closer to the latter. This is less than half the power draw of the heaviest SSDs we’ve reviewed, and it should be fine in a laptop and can be installed without a heatsink.

The 2TB model that we’re reviewing has a centerline SSD controller and two NAND flash packages. There is space for four flash packages if needed, potentially for the 4TB SKU. The controller is the TenaFe TC2201, which is a four-channel, DRAM-less solution. This is equivalent to Phison’s E27T, Silicon Motion’s SM2268XT2, or Maxio’s MAP1602, all DRAM-less solutions that can push the PCIe 4.0 interface. There is also a discrete PMIC with the Active-Semi logo, which is a Qorvo part, and we’ve seen these before on many older WD/SanDisk SSDs. This type of solution can help with PCB spacing, and this board is pretty clean. The flash is more of a mystery as the coding is unknown or internal, but we were able to get confirmation on it from Seagate right before publishing.

We’ll start with the flash. Because this is a four-channel controller, we know it needs to use 2,400 MT/s or faster flash to make things work. We also know the drive uses QLC from store listings. This limits the options to a few, including flash from SK hynix or YMTC, but the two most likely candidates are BiCS6 QLC – used on the Kingston NV3 and the 4TB version of the WD Blue SN5000 – or Micron’s 232-layer QLC, also known as N58R. It’s possible that the drive could use both types of flash, but Seagate states N58R, so that’s what you should expect. There are differences in performance between the two, and we’ll cover that in the review. It’s normally not too difficult to see these differences, but the FireCuda X1070 is using a controller we have little experience with, which makes the process more complicated. Additionally, the firmware is encrypted, so derivation of the specific flash ID is not possible; we have to take this on faith.

As for the controller, the manufacturer TenaFe has a less-than-stellar reputation on the level of Realtek, as far as SSD controllers go, as its consumer designs are budget-oriented. Consumer drives have looser requirements than enterprise, so you can get away with weaker controllers. The TC2201 is especially lightweight, as it uses Cortex-M7 technology rather than the more typical Cortex-R5. We have seen Cortex-R8 in newer controllers, which is more powerful yet, as well as flexible RISC-V designs like Phison's E28 controller. We’ve also seen Cortex-M used as co-processors or as management cores in Crucial's proprietary drives, such as the P5 Plus. We’re going to elaborate a bit on the TC2201 because we haven’t dug into it before, and we will translate what it means for the end user.

There are advantages to using a weaker architecture, as packing in more than you need means worse power efficiency and potentially higher heat generation. It can also be more responsive – have lower latency – due to the design’s simplicity, while costing less to produce. On the other hand, reliability is more difficult to achieve with, for instance, a higher reliance on error correction. Performance also suffers, which is the top reason people dislike the TC2201. It also means that the controller needs to handle ECC differently. This controller uses FlexLDPC technology, distinct from Phison’s LDPC, WD’s/SanDisk’s multi-gear LDPC, and so forth. Superficially, this only appears to impact the user indirectly, but understanding the differences will help explain why the TC2201 is designed and used as it is, and why Seagate built the FireCuda X1070 with it.

FlexLDPC is a distinct technology that TenaFe uses, which offloads the ECC workload more than other designs – this means the main MCU can be simpler – with high-granularity adaptability, hence “flex”. The basic strategy in all modern LDPC correction is to start with low-latency hard decision making – differentiate 0s and 1s without high sensitivity – and then progressively use softer decision making, but the exact approaches differ. A side effect of this is that some systems, including FlexLDPC, can vary the code rate or effectively the number of parity bits as needed. So, the drive might be faster early in its lifespan, but may also be able to carry on longer with higher amounts of flash wear later on.

Using FlexLDPC allows the main controller to be simpler – less costly, and potentially more efficient with still good real-time latency – but also means you can pair it with lower-grade flash. The LDPC unit is capable of getting the most out of a range of flash while also guaranteeing good performance for the front half of the drive’s lifespan. This is why Seagate can use QLC with 600TBW per TB on the FireCuda X1070, keep the five-year warranty, and hit high PCIe 4.0 speeds with a cheaper controller. Consider complaints about slow reads on stale data from drives made by WD/SanDisk and Phison’s E18, then realize FlexLDPC can be more granular with degradation. This makes a budget drive feel more responsive over its typical lifetime without using expensive technology for the flash or main controller. Taken together with the FireCuda 530R – our review for that should be out soon, pointing out the deliberate design focus on reliability for it – Seagate’s approach to the budget FireCuda X1070 makes a lot of sense.

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Comparison Products

The Seagate FireCuda X1070 lands in a crowded marketplace. Older drives, or newer drives at lower performance ranges, often still linger on. This includes the Teamgroup MP44L, the Crucial P3 Plus, and the newer TeamGroup NV5000. A step up from there is the Kingston NV3, which fills the gap between these and higher-end drives. The NV3 is, in fact, a capable drive, but because it can use a range of hardware, its specifications are more restrained. More common FireCuda X1070 competitors include the Biwin NV7200 and TeamGroup MP44Q, which form a good baseline for performance expectations in its price range.

The FireCuda X1070 is perhaps at a disadvantage with its controller, but it makes up for it with guaranteed 232-layer flash and decent support. At the very top of these largely QLC-based drives are the Crucial P310, which is no longer technically on the market, and the WD Blue SN5100, now fully a SanDisk property, which leads the way.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive, and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

3DMark performance is decidedly mediocre, with 53µs latency being closer to the original budget Gen 4 SSDs like the MP44L. This is plenty fast for gaming and will beat Gen 3 drives handily for the most part, but it is far from the fastest. Many systems will be bottlenecked elsewhere, so the impact on loading times will be small. Still, if you’re building a multi-drive gaming system, there are better options if you want the best performance.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry-standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

Would the FireCuda X1070 be our first choice for a serious work system? No, but it actually does surprisingly well in PCMark. Application bandwidth is up there where it should be, with the higher-end DRAM-less options like the NV7200 and MP44Q. The NV3 also does surprisingly well in this test, so maybe that’s not too unusual. This indicates that throughput is the most important indicator here – that is, sequential bandwidth more than the drive hardware – which seems obvious until you see all scores, including latency, track this way. Put another way, drives that can reliably push data will score higher, and that means the P310 and SN5100. The SN5100 stands out with its BiCS8 QLC flash, while the P310 is simply well-optimized. The FireCuda X1070 falls into a respectable range, which means it’s going to feel better than older drives, at least.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

The X1070 supplies enough performance to make the PS5 sing. It would be a solid choice for extending your console storage. It should also work without a heatsink in this capacity, but we do recommend one for peace of mind. It’s worth protecting your hardware, and more so now than ever with creeping storage prices. Heatsinks costs in comparison remain relatively flat.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The X1070 reads very fast, writes pretty fast, but copies pretty slowly. This is likely due to the controller. Read performance can be improved in multiple ways, and the TC2201’s error correction scheme seems oriented toward balancing performance and flash endurance in a very flexible way. Our drive is very new, so one would expect it to perform well, anyway. Write speed tends to be more limited by the flash, but Micron’s N58R is pretty fast for what it is. It’s therefore likely that the controller's relative weakness limits the drive’s copy performance. The good news is that copying in this manner is not a typical application if you are running more than one SSD. The performance on this is quite good if it’s a secondary drive. As a primary drive, it’s closer to the lower end of budget options and should be treated as such.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

The FireCuda X1070’s ATTO performance is good and more or less consistent, with a few things to note. The first is the drop at 2MiB for reads, which can happen for a variety of reasons, including throttling, but we control for that. Controller and flash nuances, or nuances of certain combinations, can also throw off the curve. This depends on the size of the I/O, but also the queue depth, and we check QD1 sequential performance in CDM to verify. What we find is that the X1070 is surprisingly good at QD1 sequential reads using the very typical 1MB size, which is good enough for us to say it will feel responsive with app loading.

Sequential write performance, particularly in ATTO, is generally weaker until you get up to larger block sizes. This actually can be a good thing for a secondary drive, as many files will be in the 1MiB+ range. Multimedia files and many game files come to mind. Backups also tend to be large and sequential with output files. The weaker small I/O performance means this drive is not ideal for use with heavier or even mixed workloads, as would be typical with workstation use or other high-performance workflows. This is further supported by its weak random write latency result in CDM.

Random read latency is also poor, but it’s possible this drive would do better with stale data. We do precondition our drives, but real-world use may see different results over time. We suspect this controller might maintain performance longer, especially with QLC flash, due to its slightly unorthodox design. Random 4KB reads at QD1 are a fan favorite, but a lot of app and game loading correlates more directly with QD1 sequential reads. As a result, the overall “feel” of this drive might be better than the 55.44µs latency otherwise indicates, especially as the drive ages.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states, including the steady-state write performance.

The FireCuda X1070 writes in two distinct modes. The first is the ultra-fast pSLC mode, and the second is the ultra-slow “folding” mode, where the drive is forced to wait for data to move over to free up space. This first mode, which is also known as caching, writes at 6.28 GB/s for over 68 seconds. The ~428GB cache is fairly large – although when converting 2TB of 4-bit QLC flash to a 1-bit pSLC mode, you could have a cache over 500GB – and is able to handle even very large writes. Once the cache is exhausted, the drive writes feebly to the native QLC flash while also moving data over from the pSLC, writing at a paltry 200 MB/s. The flash itself is faster than this, but because the controller is juggling incoming writes with space-freeing actions, the average speed – and as a result, also the drive’s responsiveness – declines significantly from the expected peak.

This is the “nightmare” that you have come to expect from QLC flash. Sequential write speeds slower than mechanical HDDs? Yes. This is the worst-case, though, and the FireCuda X1070 actually beats three drives here. The fastest QLC-based drive is the Blue SN5100, and even that manages something at or below what a good SATA SSD could do. SATA drives have much higher latency, yes, but if you push an NVMe drive to folding, the actual responsiveness can actually feel as bad or worse. In other words, you really want to avoid saturating the entire pSLC cache on the X1070 and other budget drives.

We feel this could be especially true of the X1070 because it’s working with what we consider a less powerful controller, or at least one that’s not capable of handling heavier workloads. Further, the controller’s design seems to favor enhancing reads or at least read consistency. This can improve endurance if it’s able to read flash more consistently over the drive’s lifespan before having issues, and can also improve effective endurance by being able to maintain superior latency longer before having to rewrite stale data. Therefore, running out of cache is especially bad as it bypasses some advantages of the design, but this shortcoming makes sense – this is not a drive designed for heavy writes.

One reason for this is that data written to cache and then copied to native flash has low write amplification. Writing directly to the native flash – which is happening at least part of the time during folding – increases write amplification. And also not deferring writes – if the drive has to move data over it might be moving data that normally wouldn’t be written twice – increases write amplification as well. This increases flash wear, which indirectly impacts the drive’s ability to hit its TBW target. This is important to emphasize because TBW is not a substitute for raw endurance. We don’t think this will be an issue even over five years, but we also would caution against doing heavy writes on this drive. It’s better designed for read-heavy workloads.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications, such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus, disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Seagate FireCuda X1070 Bottom Line

The Seagate FireCuda X1070 is an interesting drive in some ways. This is a common theme with Seagate drives lately, as we feel the same way about the FireCuda 530R. What makes the FireCuida X1070 strange is that it’s using a less common controller, one that usually ends up in generic brands as a hardware swap. Seagate has managed to pair it with the right flash to make it more tenable in the class it occupies, which is on the faster side of budget Gen 4 SSDs. That’s almost a contradictory statement, especially when we’re looking at QLC flash. However, when QLC drives are running under normal operating conditions, they can absolutely feel fast. Drives like the WD Blue SN5100 and Crucial P310 often outperform TLC-based drives.

Seagate supplies this drive with the same support it gives the FireCuda 530R – five years, three years of data recovery services, full software support – and also gives it up to double the TBW of equivalent drives in its class, like the Biwin NV7200. This makes the FireCuda X1070 feel more like a premium-lite drive than one of the underclass cobbled together by whatever hardware is available. The company makes this work by perhaps saving money on the controller, which actually fits its plans well because it can work with a range of flash and make the most of it. It’s a weird juxtaposition of a quality experience and entry-level hardware, but it dovetails nicely with Seagate’s approach to the FireCuda 530R. It’s hitting two different areas of the market at once, and both in a novel way. We appreciate the risk-taking.

What the FireCuda X1070 actually delivers is an experience that is, on the whole, pretty good, even if it makes a better console or secondary drive than a primary hard-hitter. It’s also good for laptops, which tend to see lighter use. For new desktop builds or HTPCs where you are trying to save money, it also makes sense. The warranty and support are strong enough to carry it, in our opinion. While the drive is weak in some areas, such as in our power efficiency test, its baseline performance is adequate for this class of drive. We think the TC2201 controller might be misunderstood and should not be confused with the “USB flash drive controller” swaps we’ve seen on some SATA SSDs or anything like that. The FireCuda X1070 is a deliberate design, and that’s something that might not be conveyed well in more lax reviews.

As a result, we can recommend this drive more than a lot of contenders that have seen tons of hardware swapping or over generic, no-name brands that might even use this same controller. Our main criticism here is the pricing. Seagate clearly intends this for a different market than the FireCuda 530R, and it needs to be priced appropriately. It’s an entry-level drive – in a manner of speaking – with better support than something like the WD Green SN3000. It’s elevated to compete against some tough drives, which means it has to punch above its weight to survive, putting it in a difficult place where its price has to help compensate for its sometimes underwhelming performance, even though it has solid support. If Seagate can price it competitively, we think it could become a fan favorite.

MORE: Best SSDs

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MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

Seagate CCO Ban-Seng Teh said this week that memory price hikes had become "the new normal" for the storage industry, describing current market conditions as a supercycle driven by AI data center demand that shows no sign of following historical patterns of recovery.

"It's hard to tell if it will last forever," Teh told the South China Morning Post, adding that the current cycle was "very unusual because in the past we went through cycles of shortage and oversupply.”

Seagate has obviously felt the pressure of spiralling memory prices, with Teh confirming that the company has “definitely seen increasing costs” from rising DRAM prices, though he noted its own DRAM consumption was modest relative to PC makers or hyperscale data center operators.

According to TrendForce, server DRAM contract prices were forecast to surge roughly 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, the steepest single-quarter increase on record. What’s worse is that TrendForce revised that figure upward from an earlier estimate of 55-60%, citing worsening supply-demand imbalances as cloud service providers continued pulling forward orders to secure allocations. PC DRAM prices are also forecast to more than double QoQ over the same period, also a record.

Although Seagate may use less DRAM than other customers, there's no way it can avoid these rising costs or the subsequent price hikes necessary to maintain its margins.

DRAM isn't the only source of price pressure for Seagate, either. Volatile oil prices caused by recent conflict in the Middle East — crude briefly surged to a four-year high of nearly $120 a barrel in the past few days before retreating below $100 — have also complicated Seagate's logistics. Teh says the company is actively reviewing shipment routing in response to that crisis.

Despite the cost pressures, Seagate is riding the same wave of AI demand that is driving memory prices up. Teh said annual growth in data storage demand, which his team had expected to stay below 20% five years ago, is instead expanding in the mid-20s percentage range.

That growth has pushed the industry toward higher areal densities, and Seagate this month began shipping its Mozaic 4+ platform, the company's next-generation hard drive using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, to two unnamed hyperscale cloud providers at capacities up to 44TB per drive. According to Seagate CEO Dave Mosley, the company's nearline hard drive capacity is on allocation through the end of 2026, with supply agreements in place with major cloud customers extending into 2027. Combined with Teh's perspective, that suggests consumers looking for a break from high storage prices are unlikely to see relief any time soon.

Seagate's unannounced FireCuda X1070 NVMe SSD appeared on Amazon and Best Buy listings this week — with a full spec sheet from Best Buy and an indicated price of $829.99 — before its product page went offline, suggesting an announcement could be imminent. The drive is a PCIe Gen4x4 M.2 2280 model coming in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, and marks Seagate's first new consumer SSD in more than a year.

Sequential read speed is rated at 7,200 MB/s across all three capacities, and sequential write reaches 6,000 MB/s on the 1TB model and 6,500 MB/s on the 2TB and 4TB variants. Random performance is listed at up to 900,000 IOPS read and 1,000,000 IOPS write, depending on capacity. Seagate is bundling a 5-year warranty and three years of its Rescue Data Recovery Services across the lineup.

The X1070 trails on several key specs compared to the current FireCuda 530R. Sequential read and write speeds are lower across all three capacities, and the 530R's 4TB model is rated for 5,100 TBW versus the X1070's 2,400 TBW.

That difference may come down to NAND type. Amazon's listing described the X1070 as using "3D QLC NAND," though the performance figures sit closer to what TLC-based drives typically deliver. QLC SSDs tend to drop off more sharply under sustained sequential writes once the SLC write cache is exhausted, which would also account for the lower TBW ratings. Neither the controller nor the NAND has been confirmed by Seagate, so both remain unknown until an official announcement.

The drive is certified for the ROG Xbox Ally, and ROG Xbox Ally X handhelds, and the retail box includes a one-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate trial and a two-month Adobe Creative Cloud Pro subscription per the Best Buy spec sheet.

The decision to go with PCIe Gen4 rather than Gen5 is notable given that the FireCuda 540 uses a Gen5 interface. PCIe 5.0 SSDs remain expensive and run hot, so Gen4 makes sense given its apparent target applications, even if the X1070 appears to slot below the 530R on paper rather than above it. Seagate released no new consumer storage products in 2025, making the X1070 its first release in the client SSD market in over a year.

At this stage, no official information or launch date has been announced, and whether that $829 price tag is accurate remains unknown.

Seagate has announced that it has begun shipments of its latest hard disk drives featuring a 44TB capacity to two of its partners among the leading hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs). The new HDDs are based on the company's Mozaic 4+ platform that relies on Seagate's heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.

Seagate's Mozaic 4+ platform uses 10 platters with up to 4+ TB capacity per platter to enable drives of up to 44TB. The drives are believed to feature a 7200 RPM spindle speed as well as conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and therefore offer predictably high performance by HDD standards: think sustained data transfer rates of around 300 MB/s, though we are speculating.

Normally, Seagate and other makers of HDDs tend to release a lineup of hard drives offering different capacity points upon formal launch. With its Mozaic 4+ platform, Seagate is changing its tactics and only formally introduce its 44TB HDD that is currently being shipped to just one hyperscaler. Other large CSPs are currently qualifying Mozaic 4+-based drives, though we do not know which capacity points we are talking about.

Perhaps, the main reason why Seagate disclosed shipments of its 44TB HDDs now is the fact that its arch-rival Western Digital announced plans to ship its 40TB hard drives in the second half of the year. Unlike Seagate's Exos 44TB HDDs, Western Digital's 40TB drive does not rely on HAMR technology. Instead, it uses energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) and UltraSMR technology that greatly expands capacity at the cost of slow overwrite performance. By making this announcement now, Seagate sends its potential customers a clear message that its HAMR-based hard 44TB drives are more technologically advanced than WD's 40TB offerings.

While the difference between 40TB and 44TB may seem immaterial, when deployed at scale, that difference may become significant when power consumption per TB is considered. Seagate compares its 44TB offering to 30TB drives and claims that the new drives increase overall system efficiency by roughly 47%, which enables hyperscalers to shrink physical footprint of their storage clusters by around 100 square feet while trimming annual power consumption by approximately 0.8 million kilowatt-hours.

"Data has become one of the most valuable assets for enterprises, fueling business insights, enhancing productivity, and enabling competitive advantage," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chair and chief executive officer. "As the foundation of modern data center infrastructure, data storage solutions are essential to manage ever-increasing data volumes and maximize returns on investments in today's AI driven-world. Seagate's HAMR-based Mozaic products deliver the scale, performance, and efficiency customers need to unlock the full potential of their data"

Sold out: That was a brilliant deal but, unfortunately, as of February 25, it's sold out and no longer available for purchase at B&H Photo. The next, best option we can find right now is this 20TB WD Elements USB external hard drive for $399 over at Newegg. It's not as great a deal but it's still a good drive and one we've recommended in the past. With storage prices as they are, you're still saving money compared to rival models, and there's also a $40 saving to be had, too.

If you're trying to defy the AI price crunch and get hold of a large amount of storage for backups, archiving, and more, then this Seagate Expansion drive could be for you. Right now at B&H Photo, you can secure 20TB of Seagate storage in a USB 3.0 External Hard Drive for $319, a saving of $30 and just $16 per TB.

• Check out this deal at B&H Photo

Of course, a few months ago, this storage would have been a good deal cheaper. In December, we saw the 22TB version of this drive fall to an all-time low of $249.99. So this is slightly less storage and nowhere near as cheap. However, in a climate where AI demand is squeezing the price of RAM, SSDs, and even HDDs, this is a rare discount that gets you a lot of storage for just $16 per terabyte

This isn't a nifty SSD drive, so alongside USB connectivity, you'll need a power outlet close by. The size of the Seagate Expansion range isn't monstrous, weighing just 2.64 pounds and measuring 1.65 x 7.04 x 4.92 inches.

Out of the box, this will work with Windows and Mac, and includes an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable as well as an 18W power adapter.

As mentioned, storage is not as cheap as it used to be. Back in January, we reported that hard drive prices had surged by an average of 46% since September, and the trends are still only moving in one direction. In fact, one desperate UK resident recently flew to the United States because it was cheaper to buy drives abroad, combined with the cost of travel, than to pick them up at home.

It's safe to say that things are getting a bit wild out there. But with SSDs now costing a whopping 16x more than HDDs thanks to AI, large external hard drives still make for a decent value play, even at today's inflated prices. $16 per terabyte is the best storage we've seen in some time, and this deal is likely to sell out fast.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

Backblaze just released its annual drive reliability report, with the company calculating an overall annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.36% for 2025. According to the company page, its drives ran for a total of 115,638,676 cumulative days, with 4,317 units failing. This data comes from a total of 344,196 drives, meaning it has a good sample size that can give us a relatively accurate view of the reliability of the drives that it uses. The 1.36% AFR is the company’s best result since 2022, improving on 2025’s 1.57% AFR and the 1.70% AFR from the year before that.

Unfortunately, all the drive models that the company used suffered from failures. Two units stood out with only one failure each for the entire year — the Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB and the Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB, although the latter has only been used for one quarter. The Toshiba MGO9ACA16TE 16TB takes the third place with only three failures, followed by the Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB and the HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB, which had four and five failures, respectively.

We also don’t have a list of red-flagged drives for the entire year, but Backblaze reported three notable models that had high failure rates for the fourth quarter of 2025 — the HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB (10.29%), the Seagate ST10000NM0086 10TB (5.23%), and the Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY 16TB (4.14%).

The company investigated the reason for HGST’s double-digit failure rate, which was a first for that particular drive. It has ruled out temperature or airflow changes, and the current thought is that it has been affected by vibration. But given that these drives are about 7.5 years old, Backblaze decided to earmark them for retirement. On the other hand, the Toshiba’s 4.14% failure rate is already an improvement over the reported 16.95% from the previous quarter, which has already been addressed via a firmware update. Although this is still a bit high, it’s expected to continue normalizing as the new firmware is rolls out.

Despite that, Backblaze says that drive technology has improved over the years, and that capacity is continuously increasing while cost per GB is dropping — at least before the memory chip and storage shortage that begun in late 2025. While hard drives are still cheaper the RAM and SSDs, they’ve have surged by around 46%, with the Seagate Barracuda 24TB now priced at around $500.

In the AI boom, we've already seen data centers switch to hard drives not only to alleviate cost, but also to combat limited SSD availability. Now, Seagate is here to help by updating its existing lineups with new 32 TB variants created for AI workloads: SkyHawk AI for $699.99, Exos for $729.99, and the top-end IronWolf Pro for $849.99. These are much less exclusive, though, and technically aimed at regular consumers.

• Check out Seagate's 32 TB SkyHawk AI
• Check out Seagate's 32 TB IronWolf Pro

The 32 TB capacity represents the largest size mainstream, generally available HDDs have been able to reach. To be clear, higher capacity drives do exist, but they're enterprise-grade; not available directly from the manufacturer's website. Moreover, Seagate itself has 32 TB offerings built using HAMR, but these new units all use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) for consistent and reliable performance.

Moreover, all three of these are standard 3.5" SATA III drives, spinning at 7200 RPM, and equipped with a 512 MB cache pool. In terms of workload, these are rated for ~550 TB/year with 2.5 million hours of MTBF. You'll also find the same 5-year warranty included across the board, along with Seagate's software suite.

As for SKU-specific specs, the SkyHawk AI is the entry-level "video-optimized" option, and Seagate says it can record/store more than 10,000 hours of video with metadata and analysis. It includes a bunch of AI features like ImagePerfect AI, which is supposed to prevent dropped frames when running tens of streams in parallel. The drive can also sustain read/write speeds of up to 285 MB/s.

Moving on to the IronWolf Pro, its 32 TB variant is aimed at sprawling NAS setups where multi-bay configs are the norm. It shares many of the same specs but comes with AgileArray software for RAID configs. It also has RV sensors to maintain performance when spinning next to other drives. You also get IronWolf Health Management for predictable health monitoring. It's priced at $729.99, so just $30 more than the SkyHawk.

Finally, we have the top-end Exos 32 TB, which is technically not a consumer hard drive since it's aimed at small to mid-sized hyperscalers, but no one's stopping you from buying one. The press release says Seagate is targeting data center reliability with Exos thanks to its Mozaic technology. Once again, the on-paper specs are largely identical, but these should consume less power, which matters in cloud environments. Exos drives also have an impressive 3 TB per platter density.

We couldn't find an active listing for this one, sadly, but links for the other drives are included above. So, whether you're just an enthusiast looking to level up your archival duties, or a professional hunting for an enterprise-grade solution for your company, there's at least one drive in these lineups that fits your needs.

For those who need to carry large volumes of data while traveling, the Seagate Expansion 22TB external HDD is currently available at a great price. This high-capacity storage drive saw a price drop a few months ago, dropping to about $290, but right now it is available at its lowest price yet of $249.99 on Amazon.

This external hard drive should offer plenty of space for you to store your pictures, videos, game file backups, and all sorts of other data. It is also a reliable option if you don’t want to rely on the cloud or invest in a dedicated NAS.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

The Seagate Expansion drive isn't meant for speed-critical data transfers, such as video editing or gaming directly off the drive, but rather as a long-term storage and data backup solution. Whether you’re archiving old projects, offloading media libraries, or creating backups, this external HDD offers excellent value per terabyte, especially at its current discounted price. It is essentially a traditional desktop hard disk drive contained inside a rugged plastic enclosure with a USB 3.0 port for data transfer, which isn’t the fastest but is still good enough for large data backups.

In addition to the USB connection, a dedicated power source is also required, so make sure you have an additional outlet next to your PC. The drive has a fairly small form factor, measuring 1.65 x 7.04 x 4.92 inches and weighing 2.64 pounds.

It is compatible with Windows, Chrome, and Mac operating systems, although for the latter, it is recommended to reformat the drive to enable Time Machine compatibility. An 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and an 18W power adapter are included with the drive. Seagate also offers its Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups along with a one-year standard warranty for customers in the U.S.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

There are deals in every direction at the moment as we lurch ever-forward to the massive Black Friday sales extravaganza, and speaking of massive, today's deal is on one rather large Hard Disk Drive. The Seagate BarraCuda Compute 24TB HDD is marked down to just $249.99 at Newegg, a superb price for a large storage drive, especially with the recent price rises across the board on RAM, memory, and storage.

• Grab this deal at Newegg

Bigger is most definitely better, especially when it comes to storage capacities. The more room, the more data can be hoarded. Available at Newegg, this deal knocks $50 off the $299.99 list price of the drive, a 17% discount. The drive in question (model no: ST24000DM001) is on sale for its lowest price in at least the last 30 days.

The Seagate BarraCuda comes in the standard 3.5" metal chassis and is a CMR drive with a 512MB cache and 7,200 RPM disk spinning speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers the fastest available speeds for this kind of storage and is the standard for most PC and NAS setups. Its large capacity means you can store reams of data, including pictures and video files.

Seagate's BarraCuda range of hard drives comes in several sizes, from a tiny 1TB drive to this 24TB monster and above. The BarraCuda is backed up by Seagate's 2-year limited parts and labor warranty. It might not have the impressive 5-year warranty of the EXOS range, but you are paying a lot less for this non-enterprise drive.

We are starting to see massive price increases on some of our favorite computer components, with RAM especially impacted. Knock-on effects from NAND and memory price hikes mean SSD prices are going to go up, and HDD drives will follow the trend. It's worth noting prices now and during Black Friday to see if it's a good time to pick up some extra storage, before price rises get silly.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best early Black Friday PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

Fake hard drives have become more common over the past decade or so, as online marketplaces have connected third-party sellers and buyers. That's exactly what happened to Reddit user u/BulyudiPorti, who purchased a Seagate external hard drive — or at least thought they did — and received a hollow drive with barely anything inside.

datahoarder from r/DataHoarder/comments/1nykjtr/fake_seagate_external_drives

As seen above, the user opened the drive only to find a small circuit board driving a microSD Card, glued to the chassis with a piece of metal underneath. An identical metal block is also attached to the top lid to give it a false sense of heft, so it feels real at first glance. The user echoes that sentiment, saying how "everything about it looked and felt legit," up until the disassembly revealed what was really lying under the hood.

No further details were shared, such as where the drive was purchased, but we can see it's packaged as a 1TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim, a fairly common option on the market. The innards of this model reveal a 2.5-inch SATA hard drive inside the enclosure, with a SATA-to-USB adapter at the top. So, it's safe to say that seeing a sticky SD card hastily strapped together in there instead confirms you've been scammed.

Lots of commenters pointed out that this is easily avoidable: all you need to do is buy from reputable vendors or marketplaces with stringent consumer protection laws. The original poster never replied, possibly lending credence to the narrative that they perhaps got it from somewhere disreputable, with one commenter mocking, "Wdym the $29.90 24TB drive is a scam?" Since there are no conclusive details, we must reserve our judgment.

Stay vigilant out there, no matter where you're buying from. If a deal looks way too enticing, it's most likely a scam, and bad actors are often ten steps ahead of you to game the system out of issuing returns. However, even buying from reputable platforms can sometimes end badly. Just recently, someone received a literal brick in lieu of the RTX 5080 they ordered from Amazon, and that's just one story out of countless others. Check out our roundup of the best external drives to inform yourself of what's actually worth buying. We also regularly scour for deals so you can score a legit discount.

If you’ve been waiting for that next leap in storage capacity, your patience has paid off. Seagate has launched its 30TB drives in both the Exos and IronWolf Pro lines, with larger capacities yet to come. This represents a significant leap forward from the previous generation’s 24TB limit, with special attention paid to power consumption. It’s never been possible to get more storage in a smaller footprint for HDDs than this, and that's thanks to the firm's new laser-driven tech. Seagate employs its new laser-powered heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology with this drive, a first for a mass-market enterprise hard drive.

The Mozaic 3+ technology platform enables an unprecedented amount of storage density by using a laser to heat a small area of the disk to 450°C (842°F) before recording data to it, thus allowing bits to be packed into a smaller area. For end users, there is no difference in use, performance, or reliability.

Seagate has unveiled drives of up to 36TB for shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which comes with performance penalties, and 32TB for the more performant conventional magnetic recording (CMR), so far without an overwhelming increase in power consumption. This is exciting news for storage enthusiasts who want to get the most storage in the smallest space by using the fewest drives possible. Large data, particularly with evolving AI workloads, is becoming an everyday part of life for businesses, home labbers, and data hoarders alike. SSDs remain prohibitively expensive unless there are specific performance needs, so HDD tech continues to march forward.

If you are truly looking for the largest HDD possible, it’s certainly worth looking at the Seagate Exos M and IronWolf Pro. Although both drives are great for enterprise, home users may be better off with the latter, especially for NAS. If you can get by with smaller drives, especially a larger count of smaller drives, then some money can be saved by opting for the last generation of 20TB-24TB HDDs, although at some points, the price per terabyte gets quite close. But let’s see what the Exos M brings to the table in terms of performance.

Seagate Exos M Specifications

Through the use of 3TB+ platters, the Seagate Exos M is available at 28TB/30TB for CMR and 32TB/36TB for SMR. 24TB and 32TB models for CMR are also listed in the product manual, but are not currently available. We’re looking at the 30TB CMR part today, as many users do shy away from SMR when possible.

30TB is the largest hard drive we’ve tested to date, and it doesn’t come cheaply, with pricing at $569.99/$599.99 for the two CMR capacities. The 30TB model can achieve sustained write speeds of up to 275 MB/s at 7,200 RPM with a 512MB cache – this is as good as it gets. Seagate's warranty covers the drive for five years with a maximum workload rate limit of 550TB per year.

At ~$20 per TB or ~$0.020 per GB, you are paying a premium against drives like the Seagate BarraCuda, the WD Red Pro, as well as Seagate’s SkyHawk AI, IronWolf Pro, and Exos X20. Then again, none of those drives reach this capacity, and the highest capacities for these drives are not too far off from this price. Better deals can definitely be had if you’re willing to compromise in one area or another – like the warranty – but this drive is essentially at the top for storage density at the moment.

Seagate Exos M Software and Accessories

Seagate’s site has SeaTools and DiscWizard available for the Exos M. SeaTools is available for Windows and Linux, and also comes in a bootable form. Natively, this has a GUI, but there is a comprehensive CLI guide available. It allows for maintenance of the HDD through diagnostics and monitoring. DiscWizard, on the other hand, is a Windows application that guides you through the process of preparing your drive, which includes formatting, partitioning, and data transfer and backup.

Seagate Exos M: A Closer Look

We see three Winbond ICs on the drive PCB. The first is labeled W634GU6QB-12 with the “4G” for 4Gb, or 512MB, and the “6” indicating a 16-bit rather than 8-bit configuration. This is a volatile DDR3L cache for the drive. The second is labeled 25N01GWZEIG, which is “1G” or 1Gb, that is 128MiB, of SPI non-volatile SLC NAND flash for the controller. Lastly, we have a 32Mbit or 4MiB package of NOR flash also for the controller. SSDs, for their part, also have integrated memory to handle booting and firmware execution.

Related to this is Seagate’s Multi-Tier Caching (MTC) technology, which we’ve mentioned in previous Seagate HDD reviews. Seagate continues to improve on this technology, which is effectively a memory hierarchy utilizing some intelligence to improve drive performance. This is workload-dependent, which incorporates I/O size and type into the drive’s calculation of how to cache the data. Improvements here are built on top of Seagate’s refined HAMR implementation, or what they call the Mozaic 3+ platform, which essentially enables higher capacities. The main goal is to squeeze as much capacity out as possible without making the drives unusable in terms of performance or power consumption.

Looking more closely, we see the SMOOTH Thor controller, which is the motor driver and power management IC for the drive, manufactured by STMicroelectronics. The other chip is Seagate’s controller/ASIC, made in 12nm, which manages the drive in a way comparable to an SSD controller. Together, these handle drive functions and operation and are separate from the media itself. SSDs also feature power management, often with PMICs, and often include a separate NAND flash controller as part of the main ASIC. SSDs also have separate NAND flash packages for their media and may or may not have a DRAM cache, but such caches are used for metadata, while HDDs use them for write caching.

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Comparison Products

Right now, the only other 30TB we’ve had on our testbed is the Seagate IronWolf Pro. For the sake of comparison, we’ve included the previous generation of drives, including the 22TB WD Gold, the 20TB WD Red Pro, the 20TB Toshiba X300 Pro, the 20TB Seagate SkyHawk AI, plus the 20TB Seagate Exos X20 and IronWolf Pro. These hard drives are not all targeting the same market segments. The WD Gold is an enterprise drive like the Exos serie,s while the Red Pro and IronWolf Pro lean more towards NAS. The SkyHawk is for surveillance systems, like WD’s Purple line, while the X300 Pro is designed for workstations.

Usually, if you’re looking at cutting-edge drives in terms of capacity, you are less concerned about other factors like price. You may pay more attention to power efficiency and heat generation, as well as specifications for noise and vibration. Nevertheless, new technology should be compared to the old to identify improvements beyond capacity alone. HDDs tend to only have iterative advances from generation to generation, which can make the decision process more focused on the user rather than the drive – that is, storage is an investment with wider goals than any single drive or solution.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

Who doesn’t love the idea of a 30TB drive just for games? Unfortunately, games these days benefit massively from SSDs, with many even requiring them. Your load times will generally be abysmal with an HDD, even a fast one, although there are exceptions. You’re more likely to use an HDD like this to build a game with compressed assets than to play one.

In any case, the Exos M returns average performance in 3DMark. Previously, we would recommend the 8TB Seagate FireCuda if you really want to use an HDD for gaming, but unfortunately, it is currently difficult to find that drive. You can get a 12TB WD Blue direct from WD, though, with CMR technology at 7,200 RPM as a good alternative.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

You probably also don’t want to be using an HDD for your primary or boot drive. You’ll have a much better experience with an SSD. However, HDDs can be useful for asset storage, archiving, and more for your applications. They are also fast enough to record sequential streams if you like to record videos or gaming sessions. Anything latency-sensitive is out of the question, though.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

We are a little disappointed in the Exos M’s copy performance, but we can see that this is from the poor read transfer rate. We know the drive can read a lot faster than this sequentially, so the nature of our test throws it for a loop. We would not recommend using a drive for storage/transfers involving a lot of smaller files, anyway, and ultimately, the difference in copy rate isn’t massive in DiskBench for HDDs. Larger, compressed files make more sense as long as the data is considered at least a little bit cold – HDDs remain superior if data access is less frequent.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads. These tests can also be useful for comparing HDDs, too.

Hard drives, and this drive in particular, like larger block sizes. Optimally, you would be working with 1MiB or larger files to get peak performance. However, HDDs have no real problem starting as small as 32KiB. This applies to both reads and writes, as demonstrated by the ATTO benchmark.

CrystalDiskMark’s sequential tests use 1MB blocks by default, and we can see the Exos M dominate the rest of the field. Perhaps 'dominate' is too strong a word, but it does grab first place regardless of operation type or queue depth. It’s worth pointing out that queue depth isn’t as useful for HDDs in these tests compared to SSDs, which is important to recognize because file transfers are often QD1 and sequential. That said, Seagate emphasizes that the Exos M is optimized for multi-stream, mixed-use I/O with higher queue depth, but we’re still generally talking larger I/O.

Random performance, on the other hand, is relatively abysmal, but that’s expected for 4KB files on any HDD. The Exos M is designed for relatively large data chunks, as used in AI and other data-heavy applications. Seagate has optimized the drive to some extent to handle small I/O, particularly with queue depth, but you can’t expect miracles. This isn’t too surprising, as enterprise data patterns are often larger, even on SSDs with indirection unit sizes of 16 KiB or 32 KiB for QLC flash drives.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

We use Iometer to hammer the HDD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

HDDs aren’t quite as exciting as SSDs when it comes to our sustained write test. While SSDs can be all over the place due to the nature of pSLC caching, HDDs are much more consistent. The Exos M comes out on top, which is not too surprising, as larger HDDs tend to be as fast as or faster than previous lower-capacity models. The difference here is rather small, though, so if this is a realistic workload for you, then you can get by with a smaller drive – unless you need a lot of storage in a limited space and are factoring power consumption into your equation.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Seagate touts the high power efficiency of this model, and we must say that, although it appears unfavorable on our charts, the capacity needs to be factored in. This benchmark is based on our DiskBench test, which inherently disfavors the Exos M. The Exos M is barely the fastest drive in sustained sequential writes, too. This means that our average power consumption results are closer to the mark, and while the Exos M is still at the bottom, it’s not too far off from drives that have 33% less capacity.

Consider that you need six 20TB Red Pros for four 30TB Seagate Exos M drives. Given that the workload rate limit (WRL) is essentially in the same ballpark, the fact that the Exos M isn’t particularly impressive in terms of performance is less critical. You’re picking this drive to maximize storage density instead, with relatively predictable workloads – smaller random writes will be cached in the volatile DRAM, too. We would still like to see better numbers here, but in terms of expected workloads, the Exos M holds its own.

Seagate itself claims that power consumption per terabyte is down as much as 45% which, when combined with the relatively modest cost per terabyte, means a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). This is derived from, in part, its PowerChoice technology, which increases the number of power states, especially in idle, to save power wherever possible. Our idle consumption test is more aggressive, but given the WRL, you will likely see better power savings than what is expected from our results. Heat generation derives from power consumption, so the important thing is that the 30TB Exos M shouldn’t challenge existing cooling infrastructure.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability.

Seagate Exos M Bottom Line

The Seagate Exos M hard drive is an accomplishment, but its place in the market has to be understood within the context of high-capacity storage. You’re not buying this drive for performance alone but rather for a lower total cost of ownership. A larger drive means more data in the same footprint, and maintaining the same performance level without adding any burdens means that workload optimization and power consumption improvements are required. This isn’t as complicated as all the new fancy technology details insinuate from the end user’s viewpoint, as fundamentally, the Exos M offers storage density without trying to do things outside of what HDDs do.

The drive sufficiently makes its case with reasonable performance where it matters and pricing that isn’t ridiculous. If you need the most amount of storage possible for a given space, the Exos M is likely your answer. The IronWolf Pro line is similar and might be a better choice for home users and NAS, while the Exos M leans more toward enterprise. In either case, you can get the same or more storage at the Exos M’s price per terabyte if you’re willing to go with the last generation of drives. This could make sense if you have drive bays to spare. If you’re a regular user, on the other hand, you're likely to look elsewhere, as $600 is a steep entry point.

One thing we would like to point out is that this drive is and will continue to be available with both CMR and SMR technologies. SMR allows for even higher capacity but has significant performance caveats. Know your workloads before you pull the trigger.

As far as the CMR Exos M goes from our review today, performance is largely as expected, and some of Seagate’s optimizations – with multi-tier caching and improvements for idle power states – may be more significant for your specific use case. Just don’t read too much into it, as at the end of the day, an HDD is an HDD, and for now, this is the biggest of them all.

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The IronWolf Pro 30TB pushes the popular NAS hard drive series up to a new high capacity using laser-powered recording tech, so now you can have your favorite NAS drive with up to a whopping 30TB of storage without giving anything up. Seagate employs its new laser-powered heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology with this drive, a first for a mass-market hard drive.

The Mozaic 3+ technology platform enables an unprecedented amount of storage density by using a laser to heat a small area of the disk to 450°C (842°F) before recording data to it, thus allowing bits to be packed into a smaller area. For end users, there is no difference in use, performance, or reliability.

We would understand if the IronWolf Pro name is more recognizable and catchy to you than Exos, which is the enterprise counterpart for the Pro model. The former instills a certain sense of reliability, and this is backed by Seagate’s health monitoring and complimentary data recovery services. The IronWolf Pro also often comes in at a lower price, which only sweetens the deal.

HAMR enables reaching a higher capacity ceiling without significantly increasing power consumption or heat production. That’s a great selling point as the IronWolf Pro is best used with two or more drives in a NAS system. If your drives are idle a lot, you’re also in good shape, as Seagate has specifically optimized for that condition. Performance also remains as expected, although Seagate has tuned the drive for mixed workloads and higher queue depths. What’s not to love?

Well, for one, the drive’s performance is not really breaking any new ground. This is expected, so it's not really worthy of a demerit. However, we can’t shake the feeling that this drive is made for more serious workloads, which makes it less attractive to everyday users. Also expected, given the drive’s high base price. Dropping over $1,000 for two of these even at 28TB is not something you would do lightly. The relative cost – $ per terabyte – isn’t too bad, but many people could be better off going with older drives in the ~20TB range. This means this drive is meant for scenarios where data density is the number one priority.

Seagate IronWolf Pro Specifications

The new Seagate IronWolf Pro adds 28TB and 30TB to its capacity offerings, both with the performant conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology that doesn't involve performance tradeoffs like we see with cheaper shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drives. Seagate uses this same tech in its enterprise-focused Exos 30TB drive, though things diverge a bit as the Exos M has a 32TB CMR planned with SMR options up to at least 36TB. Still, these are very similar drives with almost identical specifications. The IronWolf Pro can hit up to 275 MB/s with sustained transfers, and it has 512MB of DRAM cache.

Currently, the 30TB IronWolf Pro is priced at $549.99 on Seagate’s website, and the 28TB model is $529.99 on Amazon, although both prices are discounted. This makes it less expensive than the Exos M, which makes it not a bad deal at all.

As with the Exos M, the IronWolf Pro is warrantied for five years with a 550TB per year workload rate limit (WRL). In addition, the IronWolf Pro comes with three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services, which makes it more consumer-friendly versus the enterprise-focused Exos M. The drive is otherwise optimized for use in NAS.

Seagate IronWolf Pro Software and Accessories

Seagate has the same downloads for the IronWolf Pro that it does for the Exos M: SeaTools and DiscWizard. SeaTools is for diagnostics and drive monitoring and works in both Windows and Linux with graphical and command-line interfaces. DiscWizard is for formatting, partitioning, and preparing drives for use. The IronWolf Pro then diverges from the Exos M by having IronWolf Health Management (IHM) which is active protection for the drive to assist with maintaining the drive and its data in NAS use. This further emphasizes that the IronWolf Pro is intended for different environments than the Exos M.

Seagate IronWolf Pro: A Closer Look

The IronWolf Pro PCB looks very similar to the Exos M, the primary difference being that the DRAM is made by Nanya instead of Winbond. It is otherwise comparable. This is not unexpected, and we regularly see different brands of DRAM used on SSDs for metadata caching. The other main memory here is ICs of NAND and NOR flash memory for use by the drive controller.

The IronWolf Pro uses the same controllers as the Exos M, too. The SMOOTH Thor by STMicroelectronics is designed for power management and motor control, while Seagate’s 12nm ASIC serves as the primary controller for drive and media operations. From the hardware side of things, the two drive lines are identical, although there are firmware and feature differences. The drive has also been certified compatible with certain NAS systems, such as QNAP, with a focus on AI use cases.

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Comparison Products

Aside from the Seagate Exos M, which is the only other drive we’ve tested at 30TB to date, we have a good sampling across the range of high-capacity drives from the previous generation. These include the 22TB WD Gold, the 20TB WD Red Pro, the 20TB Toshiba X300 Pro, the 20TB Seagate SkyHawk AI, as well as the 20TB Seagate Exos X20 and IronWolf Pro. Some of these can go up to 24GB or 26GB, but the general performance range is the same. These drives often use the same hardware within the same brand, but with different optimizations or warranties. The closest comparison, in this case, should be made to the WD Red Pro, as it – like the IronWolf Pro – is made for the NAS segment.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

The IronWolf Pro scores exactly in line with the Exos M, as expected. Its performance is neither good nor bad, but rather somewhere in the middle. Generally, we don’t suggest using an HDD for gaming, so these results may be less interesting than others.

At the time of review, we would recommend the 12TB WD Blue, which can be purchased directly from WD with CMR technology at 7,200 RPM, if you want an HDD for gaming. HDDs can still make sense for some games, particularly older games, or they can be a backup repository for stale games to which you will eventually return. This can save on bandwidth if you have slow or limited Internet access, or are going on the road. This recommendation only applies to smaller, consumer drives, as you can get NAS-focused drives at higher capacities for the same price per terabyte if your budget is bigger in absolute terms.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

The PCMark 10 results are also somewhat disappointing. We don’t think any HDD makes sense for a primary drive for your OS as boot and application load times will be much higher. HDDs make more sense as secondary drives for assets, archiving, media, and larger files. HDDs also make sense for content creation not only for these types of files but also for stream recording, as that is a sequential workload with relatively modest performance requirements. It seems like the last generation of drives from Seagate might be the way to go if you need lots of space but not 30TB+ of space.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The IronWolf Pro is able to write at a fast speed, but its reads are more underwhelming in our DiskBench testing. The overall copy speed is acceptable. This test involves files of various sizes, which is more indicative of consumer use than enterprise, so take that into consideration.

While it’s true that a NAS HDD might also see a range of file types, for the most part, you are dealing with larger files with the possibility of ingress caching, where theoretical speeds might be hit more often than with SSDs. That is, workloads that match an HDD’s performance profile should be more consistent. If you are looking at a drive for general storage, though, we would again recommend the last generation of drives.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads. These tests can also be useful for comparing HDDs, too.

In ATTO the IronWolf Pro generally managed better than the Exos M, at least with smaller block sizes. It’s possible that the IronWolf Pro is optimized for a larger range of I/O or file sizes while the Exos M is really intended for big data chunks. The Exos M does have better peak performance in sequential I/O in CrystalDiskMark. Still, the last generation of drives performs well enough that you need to be sold on capacity to look at these 30TB drives. That makes sense since, let’s be honest, most people aren’t looking to buy just a single $550-600 HDD. The name of the game is density.

Random 4K performance is average to poor, but we are aware that Seagate has optimized these drives for mixed workloads usually with larger than 4K I/O and at higher queue depths. SSDs are the obvious way to go when dealing with smaller I/O and when latency is critical. For more predictable workloads where you have large datasets, though, an HDD like this can make more sense, particularly when you compare the cost to a ~30TB SSD.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

We use Iometer to hammer the HDD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

HDDs love nothing more than sustained writes with a generous 1MiB block size and plenty of queue depth. All of the tested drives return consistent results with the 30TB ones coming out on top. The performance difference between the best and the worst here is minute, so once again it’s more about the capacity.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Seagate went to some pains to improve power efficiency on these new, larger drives. Although the efficiency doesn't look the best in our results, keep in mind this is because the drives perform similarly, but you’re working with up to 50% more capacity. Average power consumption is essentially the same. Our idle power testing is also not favorable for Seagate’s new drives – Seagate specifically improved idle power consumption, but our testing is worst-case in terms of power settings.

As a result, home users won’t see much benefit here. Systems with multiple drives and proper configuration, on the other hand, could see greater savings. On the whole, even if the drives only perform equally, there is still a significant advantage in storage density with little need for additional cooling. This is where these 30TB drives shine. For simpler systems or if you are only going for one drive, the last generation remains compelling.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability.

Seagate IronWolf Pro Bottom Line

The Seagate IronWolf Pro gets a half-star better score than the Exos M for two good reasons: one, it has support that’s more attractive to regular users, and two, it looks like it might be priced better as well. Peak performance is still excellent – it’s as fast or faster than any other HDD on the market – and, despite quirks in some tests, it’s fast enough for what an HDD needs to do. This is especially true for NAS, which is stream-focused, not that it or the Exos M are bad at enterprise workloads. The difference here is that the IronWolf Pro has a three-year data recovery service and, in general, is designed for easier health monitoring. It’s also already been discounted with a price per terabyte that’s fairly competitive with last-generation HDDs.

There are some problems with this drive, though. The first is that it’s designed to be operated in units with two or more drives, which, given the base price, is quite expensive. It makes sense for small- and medium-sized businesses for on-premises storage and might be a dream come true for some home labbers and certainly data hoarders. In these situations, it could be a good alternative to the Exos M if you really need ~30TB/drive density. It’s a much harder sell for a regular home user who can make do with 20TB or smaller drives at a lower absolute price point.

The second problem is that the drive does have some performance quirks in our tests, which, again, seem to make the drive more viable for heavy workloads than basic file storage. This isn’t a real issue at the moment, given the barriers to entry at this capacity – this isn’t your father’s WD Black HDD – but it does underline the notion that this is a niche solution at the moment. AI enthusiasts will undoubtedly recognize the value, but you can likely make do with less storage density for most basic needs. Seagate went to considerable effort to reduce power consumption on this drive, but this is again relative to the capacity, so shop with your priorities in mind.

On the whole, we like this drive as it continues the IronWolf line, and what makes it great, just at a much bigger size. Bigger drives are to come, sure, but there was a decent stall period around 20TB. It can replace specialized drives – such as the SkyHawk AI/Purple for surveillance – in a pinch if you’re impatient, too. If you’ve been waiting for a capacity upgrade, you could definitely do worse.

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For lovers of large capacity storage solutions, we've spotted a rather generous deal on one of Seagate's large external HDDs. You may be a data backup enthusiast or just a casual user who feels the need for some backup storage of photos and videos as a tertiary redundancy solution. Whatever the use case, those who need high-capacity storage options to store their precious data can easily pick up this large 26TB drive and store a massive amount of data.

Best Buy's price drop means that you are saving a substantial $100 off the list price of Seagate's Expansion Desktop 26TB HDD, now only $249. The large 26TB capacity means plenty of room for your files and data, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds are fast enough for the majority backup situations. So, if you want something to accompany a NAS setup, a stand-alone solution, or even to shuck, this Seagate external HDD deal may interest you.

• Check out the deal at Best Buy

Even though this external HDD uses USB Type-C (3.0 Gen 1) the hard drive is unsuitable for hosting the file installations for running your computer games. These more traditional hard disk drives in these external storage solutions are fantastic for storing large amounts data that doesn't require superfast transfer rates at a much more affordable price point, but cannot compete with the speeds of the latest solid state drives.

Seagate's Expansion Desktop external HDD is housed in a rugged black plastic chassis measuring about 7x2x5 inches. The case has small feet located on the bottom of the unit, with power and USB cable connections at the rear of the drive. The Seagate Expansion Desktop 26TB HDD comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable included in the box.

With any purchase of the Seagate Expansion Desktop HDD, you also have the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups. There is also a one year parts and labor warranty.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

Today, Seagate introduced its Exos M 30TB and IronWolf Pro 30TB hard disk drives (HDDs), which utilize heat-assisted magnetic recording technology. This technology employs a laser to increase storage density. This is the first time Seagate has made HAMR HDDs based on its Mozaic 3+ technology available to the mass market, marking a significant milestone for both the company and the storage industry, which unleashes an unprecedented amount of storage density.

Seagate has also shared its in-depth performance benchmarking, which we've shared and analyzed below, highlighting strong performance trends for the new HAMR drives. Seagate's 30TB and 28TB versions of the Exos M and IronWolf Pro hard drives are now officially available globally through the Seagate online store and through the company’s network of approved resellers and distribution partners. Let's take a deeper look at the drives and Seagate's benchmarks.

New CMR capacity champions

New CMR capacity champions

Seagate’s Exos M 30TB and 28TB, as well as IronWolf Pro 30TB and 28TB hard drives, are built on the company’s Mosaic 3+ platform, which represents Seagate’s second-generation implementation of HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording). Unlike the first generation, which never reached the market, Mosaic 3+ is now commercially available.

To enable high-density writing, the drives are equipped with a specialized plasmonic writer subsystem featuring a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser. This laser heats a small spot on the FePT recording layer on the disk to approximately 450°C (842°F), altering its magnetic coercivity and allowing data to be recorded on the heated spot. Reading is handled by heads that use Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features multiple reading sensors to help mitigate signal interference between adjacent tracks, ensuring data can be read accurately even at very high track densities.

The new 30TB HDDs come in the industry-standard 3.5-inch form factor and operate at a rotational speed of 7,200 RPM, which is standard for enterprise-class performance hard drives to balance performance and power consumption. Yet, for those clients who need to alter consumption, Seagate's PowerChoice adjusts idle power consumption and PowerBalance technology enables balancing power consumption and IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance.

Additionally, the drives are equipped with a 512 MB multi-segmented cache. This multi-part buffer helps smooth data transfers and enhances performance during intensive read/write operations, particularly under burst workloads.

Speaking of performance, the drives feature 3TB platters with a rather unprecedented areal density, offering a maximum sustained transfer rate of 275 MB/s, approximately 5 MB/s higher than previous-generation drives. As for random performance, the HDDs are rated for up to 170/350 random read/write IOPS (4K, QD16), down from 170/550 random read/write IOPS in the case of the Exos X18 HDDs from a few years ago.

Although Seagate's Exos M 30TB and IronWolf Pro 30TB have many similarities, they are formally designed for different applications. The former is designed for large-scale deployments in cloud and enterprise environments (specifically those used for AI), so it comes with numerous design enhancements to improve reliability and ensure predictable performance in highly-vibration environments, such as a top and bottom attached motor, RV sensors, and other means to reduce turbulence. By contrast, the latter are designed for use in NAS systems within commercial and enterprise environments, so the drive fully supports continuous operation in multi-bay and multi-user setups and is built to handle the stresses of modern workloads.

Compatible with existing storage systems: up to 36PB per rack.

Compatible with existing storage systems: up to 36PB per rack.

Seagate's new Exos M 30TB and IronWold Pro 30TB are the first HAMR-based HDDs that will be available in channel and retail markets, as previously the company only shipped such drives to select hyperscale customers who had qualified them beforehand. Being available to a broader range of clients is clearly a significant milestone for Seagate.

Both of Seagate's 30TB HDDs utilize conventional magnetic recording (CMR), ensuring compatibility with standard storage systems while increasing capacity. This tech also preserves as much performance as possible, unlike Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology.

In addition, the drives use a SATA 6 Gbps interface and consume 6.9W (average) – 9.5W (maximum), so they are drop-in compatible with existing storage systems, assuming that they can handle 30TB HDDs (which may not be the case with all NAS, for example).

A modern 4U storage server can accommodate up to 100 3.5-inch HDDs; thus, a fully equipped machine with Seagate's 30TB HDDs can store up to 3,000TB of data (3PB). Thus, the new hard drives enable the storage of from 30PB (42U rack) to 36PB (48U rack) per single rack, which is unprecedented storage density.

Exos M Performance

Exos M Performance

However, while Seagate's 30TB drives indeed increase capacity and storage density, they still offer roughly the same amount of performance as their predecessors, so the increased density doesn't come at the cost of performance in the most important types of workloads for HDDs. Below we have some of the performance tests conducted by Seagate, with the mixed workload results showing a clear advantage and highlighting the performance tuning for real-world applications.

The sequential read/write bandwidth (128 KiB, Queue 1) benchmark shows that both the Exos M 30TB and the Exos X24 achieve nearly identical peak read and write speeds, around 275 MB/s on the outer tracks. This indicates that the increased platter density in the Exos M does not compromise large-block sequential throughput. From a throughput-per-spindle perspective, both drives perform equally well, suggesting that Seagate maintained read/write head performance while increasing capacity.

In the 4 KiB random read benchmark at a queue depth of 16, the Exos M 30TB delivers roughly 171 IOPS, closely matching the Exos X24. Despite narrower tracks due to the denser media, the Exos M sustains equivalent read performance, implying that Seagate’s TDMR-based read heads effectively maintain signal quality and accuracy. This confirms that small-block read I/O does not degrade with the transition to HAMR and higher areal density.

However, the 4 KiB random write performance reveals the only notable weakness in the Exos M, as it trails the Exos X24 significantly, achieving only about 346 IOPS at the same queue depth. This drop is consistent with known limitations of HAMR, such as more complex write calibration, which affects short-duration, high-frequency write operations. Nonetheless, the performance penalty appears specific to small-block writes, which is visible in this synthetic test but may not be noticeable in real-world workloads.

Keep in mind that nearline HDDs (such as the Exos M) are not exactly designed for small random writes — SSDs or caching mechanisms step in to satisfy those types of workloads, even in consumer NAS. For hard drives, random writes tend to occur at larger block sizes, such as the 128KiB size outlined in the same chart. In this workload, which is more representative of real-world conditions, we can see that the Seagate drive delivers nearly the same performance as its predecessor.

In the mixed-workload benchmark, which combines 128 KiB random writes (Q1) and 4 KiB random reads (Q16) with the write cache disabled, the Exos M demonstrates a clear advantage. It doubles the read IOPS of the X24 and shows reduced 99.9th percentile read latency. This suggests that the Exos M's architecture, specifically its segmented 512 MB cache and optimized read path, handles concurrent I/O more efficiently. This also clearly shows that Seagate has prioritized tuning for real-world hard drive usage scenarios.

What is perhaps more important is that sequential performance-per-TB and random performance-per-TB of the new HAMR-based 30TB HDDs are significantly lower compared to HDDs from several years back, but that is a natural and expected byproduct of the increased capacity. As a result, companies using these hard drives will mitigate this per-TB performance drop to maintain the quality of service in their data centers, often by augmenting the deployments with strategically placed flash-based caches.

IronWolf Pro Performance

IronWolf Pro Performance

The performance of the 30TB IronWolf Pro generally mimics that of the 30TB Exos M. The new drive is slightly faster in sequential workloads (128 KiB, Queue 1), demonstrating a throughput of around 277 MB/s on outer tracks, which is slightly faster compared to its 24TB predecessor. This essentially means that the new HAMR-based drive for high-end NAS applications is largely equivalent to its predecessor.

When it comes to random performance, random read IOPS are identical for both 24TB and 30TB HDDs at 84 IOPS, indicating no improvement in small-block read performance despite the 30TB’s higher platter density. However, again, random write IOPS show a slight drop for the 30TB model — 311 IOPS vs. 340 IOPS on the 24TB. This may again suggest slightly higher write latency caused by more complex write calibration on HAMR HDDs.

Availability

Availability

Don't believe what they tell you, bigger is most definitely better! Especially when it comes to available storage capacities. Popping up on Newegg's deal pages is this $50 discount on one of Seagate's massive 24TB hard disk drives. The drive in question (model no: ST24000DM001) is on sale for its lowest price in at least the last 30 days.

Today's deal is worth a look, especially at just $10 per Terabyte. Head to this Newegg link for the Seagate BarraCuda Compute 24TB HDD and pick up yours for just $249, a savvy saving of 16% from the original list price of $299.

The Seagate BarraCuda comes in the standard 3.5" metal chassis and is a CMR drive with a 512MB cache and 7,200 RPM disk spinning speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers the fastest available speeds for this kind of storage and is the standard for most PC and NAS setups. Its large capacity means you can store reams of data, including pictures and video files.

For similar prices, you can find external HDDs like the Seagate Expansion enclosure, which also comes in a 24TB capacity priced at $279. A lot of these drives are purchased and then "shucked" for the drive inside, but with this deal, you know exactly what drive you're getting and don't have to go through the hassle of shucking the unit and voiding all warranties on the drive.

Seagate's BarraCuda range of hard drives comes in several sizes, from a tiny 1TB drive to this 24TB monster. The BarraCuda drive is backed up by a 2-year limited warranty on parts and labor, which isn't as impressive as the 5-year warranty of the EXOS range, but you are paying a lot less for this drive.

Shop all things Hard Disk Drive at Newegg, and check out more products and offers.

Capacity and reliability are the hallmarks of a good HDD, and if you're looking for the best hard drives to install in your NAS, then today's deal is definitely worth a look, especially at $16 per Terabyte. Seagate's Exos range of hard drives are designed for heavy usage and reliability, so you can expect to pay more than lower-specification drives, but, if they are in a deal like this, you don't have to.

Head to this deal page at Newegg and note the discount code offer for a massive $50. The Seagate Exos X20 20TB HDD is on a limited-time deal for just $329, but act quickly as there isn't much time left. Before applying the discount code SSES2666 for the $50 discount, the price of this HDD was $379, a significant reduction from the original $699 list price.

We reviewed the Seagate Exos X20 20TB HDD back in October 2022, and back then gave the drive an Editor's Choice award for its high storage capacity for a CMR drive, impressive HDD speed, and 5-year warranty. The biggest negative was the adoption price of $699, which has now dropped significantly.

The Exos X20 comes in this 20TB capacity with a 7200 RPM speed, and 256MB cache. Transfer speeds hit a sustained rate of 285 MB/s, with a MTBF 2.5million hours, and 550TB/Yr workload rating. All the while being supported with a 5-year limited warranty.

Storage enthusiasts should check out this deal on Seagate's large 24TB External HDD drive. Arriving in these pre-Memorial Day deals, this large storage option works out as only $11.60 per Terabyte. The option is also there to "shuck" these drives if you feel comfortable doing so, and install them in a NAS or home server. This will obviously void any limited warranties, plus your mileage may vary on what drive is inside the enclosure.

Available from Best Buy, you can save $50 on the list price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 24TB HDD, now only $279. The large 24TB capacity means more room for your files, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds won't be horrendous, although they will pale in comparison to more modern SSD speeds.

The Seagate Expansion external HDD comes in a rugged black plastic chassis measuring about 7x2x5 inches. The unit is designed to stand vertically, with small feet on the bottom and a power and USB cable connection on the rear. This unit needs external power to run, an AC power adapter is included in the packaging.

Everything you need to set up this drive is included in the box with the Seagate Expansion HDD. Packaged inside is an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable, and a power adapter. Also, with the purchase of this Seagate external HDD, you have the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups.

Seagate will bring a 100-terabyte HDD to market by 2030, according to comments from its CCO. In an interview with CNBC, Chief Commercial Officer BS Teh shared Seagate's new 100 TB goal, citing demand from the AI and HPC markets driving the great leap in capacity.

"This is a key enabler for the industry to be able to deliver the storage capacity that the market needs," shared Teh when asked about the demand for 100TB units. "There's no other technology that's able to produce this capacity of storage technology to meet the growth that the market needs."

Seagate's current largest hard drive by capacity is the Exos Mozaic 3+, a 36TB drive released this year and available only to select customers. The Moziac line uses HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, briefly heating recording regions and reducing the intensity required to write data to discs, greatly improving storage density.

The Mozaic contains ten glass data platters, which Seagate has produced in capacities of up to 6TB each, making Seagate's current theoretical size limit 60TB. But the current corporate roadmap does not stretch this far, with Seagate in January saying it expects its next platform, Mozaic 4+, to bring 40TB+ HDDs in 2026, and the following Mozaic 5+ platform to bring 50TB drives in 2028 or later.

This falls well short of Seagate's 2017 roadmap, which aimed for 50TB hard drives by 2026. As a result, it could be wise to take claims of 100TB by 2030 with a grain of salt, unless Seagate has plans beyond HAMR after Mozaic 5+.

Seagate will also have energy conservation interests breathing down its neck in its race to boost capacity. As the AI market continues to demand an ever greater share of the energy grid, energy efficiency will likely be a more serious concern than consolidating capacity for enterprise users.

Teh claims that Seagate's race to 100TB is keeping conservation on the mind. "With the product itself, we design it to have lower power per terabyte, or to have higher density of the device itself, such that when you actually integrate that product into your data center, you require less space, less power, less everything, because you're using your fewer drives to fulfill that capacity." He also claims that Seagate is pushing renewable energy sources to power its production lines.

Whether the fires of AI and enterprise needs are enough to push Seagate through the goalposts by 2030 is yet to be seen. While the firm consistently releases the market's largest capacity drives, its history of falling short of over-enthusiastic stretch goals casts some doubt on the bullish claims of its C-suite.

Check out this great deal on one of the largest external HDDs on the market. Data backup enthusiasts rejoice — if you need a high-capacity storage option for your desktop, this large 28TB drive has plenty of space for you to store your pictures and videos, as well as a massive amount of any other data types. The Seagate Expansion drive is a large traditional hard disk drive contained in an external enclosure that requires its own power source. These external storage solutions are fantastic for storing data that doesn't require superfast transfer rates and are a convenient solution if you don't want to go down the NAS route. Some of these external HDD enclosures are good for shucking the drives out of, but do some research into what drives they contain, as shucking the drive will most certainly void the warranty.

You can save $60 on the list price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 28TB HDD, now only $329 at Best Buy. The massive 28TB capacity means more room for your files, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds will be fast enough for most storage and backup situations.

The 28TB Seagate Expansion HHD is housed in a rugged black plastic case that measures 7x2x5 inches with small feet on the bottom of the chassis. Power and USB cable connections are located at the rear of the drive, and this is where you will need to connect the external AC power adapter. Make sure you have ample power outlets available for connecting this device alongside your desktop PC or laptop.

The Seagate Expansion Desktop 28TB HDD comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable included in the box. Accompanying the purchase of the Seagate drive is the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups should the drive fail and you need to recover your precious data.

Don't forget to look at our Best Buy coupon codes for April 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Best Buy.

The recently imposed U.S. import duties are designed to affect the vast majority of industries, and the data storage industry is certainly not an exception. Because the underlying technologies of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, tape drives, and storage arrays are so different, the effects of tariffs could be diverse on all of them.

And it looks like HDD and SSD makers will suffer the most despite Trump’s 90-day suspension of country-specific tariffs starting April 10, whereas producers of tapes will rejoice, notes Blocks & Files.

HDDs

We are going to start with hard drives, as these are arguably the most technologically advanced storage devices with the most complex supply chain these days. There are three HDD makers: Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.

Seagate's HDD operation involves product development in the U.S. and Singapore; head manufacturing in the United States and Northern Ireland; substrate production in Malaysia; media fabrication in Singapore or Japan (when Seagate sourced platters from Showa Denko); and drive and subassembly manufacturing in China and Thailand.

Toshiba's HDD supply chain involves R&D and high-value component manufacturing in Japan (as the company usually uses media from Showa Denko), with mass assembly and component integration primarily based in China, the Philippines, and Japan (high-end HDDs).

Western Digital develops its HDDs in the U.S. and Japan. Media substrates are produced in Malaysia, but the actual media manufacturing occurs in China or Japan (when Western Digital sources from Showa). Head wafers are processed in the U.S., but the final head-gimbal assembly takes place in the Philippines and Thailand. Actual HDDs are built in Malaysia and Thailand.

Although Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital have different supply chains, their setups are subject to risks of substantial U.S. import tariffs, particularly on drives produced in China (124%), Malaysia (24%), the Philippines (17%), and Thailand (36%). Perhaps, if Toshiba shifts more production to the Philippines, it can avoid paying extremely high tariffs in the U.S., but the situation for Seagate is more complicated as a significant portion of Seagate's drives are built in China. Keeping in mind that HDDs are assembled in cleanrooms, moving their assembly away from China or Thailand quickly will be expensive and complicated.

Considering the diverse supply chains of all three makers, it is likely that U.S. customs will charge import tariffs based on where the final HDDs are assembled. Seagate and Western Digital will likely increase their operations in the U.S. to prove that there is 20% of American content in their drives to cut down duties, though it remains to be seen whether they succeed.

SSDs

With SSDs, the situation is a bit different. There are only six companies in the world that produced 3D NAND memory in high-volume — Kioxia, Micron, Sandisk, Samsung, SK hynix, and YMTC — but there are dozens of SSD makers, most of which conduct operations in China and other countries with low labor costs.

Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk are the only big makers of 3D NAND, which do not have wafer fabrication capacity in China. However, these companies use their Chinese facilities to test and package their flash memory. Under U.S. Customs law, the 'country of origin' is generally determined by the location of the last substantial transformation, the point where the product undergoes a major change. So, if a 3D NAND wafer is fabricated in Japan or Singapore but diced, tested, and packaged in China, the origin of flash is very likely to be considered China.

For now, this is not a problem as memory is now relieved from tariffs. However, Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk produce SSDs in China and drives are considered 'finished goods' and are therefore dutiable. Hence, to avoid punitive tariffs from the U.S. government, these companies will have to start making their drives elsewhere to remain competitive in the U.S. This applies to third-party SSD makers too. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to establish assembly of SSDs as it does not require cleanrooms used to make 3D NAND memory or assemble HDDs.

The lion's share of Samsung's and SK hynix's 3D NAND is made in South Korea, but they also have 3D NAND production capacity in China, mostly to serve local demand for flash memory and SSDs. However, retail SSDs from Samsung and SK hynix are assembled in South Korea, so the U.S. Customs will likely deem them as Korean products subject to a 25% import tariff (a 15% country-specific tariff is suspended for 90 days effective April 10).

For obvious reasons, 3D NAND companies will unlikely ship products containing 3D NAND memory from China to the U.S. to avoid tariffs once semiconductors are slapped with import duties. However, it remains to be seen what SK Hynix's subsidiary Solidigm will do, considering the fact that it exclusively uses memory produced at the company's Dalian facility (which used to belong to Intel). If the U.S. government decides to impose prohibitive tariffs on 3D NAND chips made in China, Solidigm will be in trouble. The same applies to Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk.

To avoid punitive country-specific tariffs when shipping SSDs to the U.S. once the country-specific tariffs are re-instated in 90 days following the April 9 pause, makers of SSDs will have to either assemble them in countries that are not subject to such import duties (e.g., those protected under the USMCA, such as Canada or Mexico), or will have to build them in the U.S. This will not relieve 3D NAND makers (or their customers) from paying import duties on memory and controller chips once they are imposed though. However, unlike makers of HDDs, SSD producers can change the origin of their products relatively easily.

Tape and optical discs

Tape drives and optical discs see different effects. IBM builds LTO tape drives in Arizona and escapes tariffs, aside from imported parts. Japan's Fujifilm makes tape in Massachusetts, so it is also safe, but Sony produces them in Japan, so it must deal with a 24% charge on tapes brought to the U.S.

Blu-ray and DVD discs are manufactured in China, India, Japan, and Taiwan. Each country's specific rate will apply when shipping these items to the U.S. and it is unlikely that anyone will relocate production of discs to America. What remains to be seen is how tariffs affect pre-recorded discs with games and movies.

Hard drives will remain the most cost-effective storage solution for data centers for years to come, but to make them more suitable for AI data centers, Seagate is developing HDDs that use a common PCIe interface and the NVMe 2.0 protocol. At GTC 2025, Seagate demonstrated a proof-of-concept system running NVMe HDDs, NVMe SSDs, Nvidia's BlueField 3 DPU, and AIStore software to show how NVMe transforms hard drives for AI workloads. Seagate is ahead of its rivals, which are also working on NVMe HDDs.

New protocol, new performance

Hard disk drives have traditionally used specialized interfaces, such as SCSI, Parallel ATA, Serial ATA (SATA), and SATA, which are fine but are reaching their limits for modern, high-performance data environments, specifically in AI and large-scale data centers. Both SATA and SAS rely on serialized protocols developed in the 1980s that carry legacy protocol layers not suited for modern high-speed data processing. Also, SAS and SATA setups require host bus adapters and additional controller layers, adding complexity, potential points of failure, and latency. As a result, these architectures are not suitable for AI workloads, which require high-throughput, low-latency access to massive datasets.

Compared to SAS/SATA, NVMe paired with PCIe offers significantly higher bandwidth, lower latency, and better scalability. Unlike SAS/SATA, which are limited to 6-12 Gbps speeds and rely on complex layers like HBAs and expanders, NVMe operates over an industry-standard PCIe interface, supporting speeds up to 128 GB/s (one HDD is not going to need more than 1 TB/s for quite a while, but on a system level, the more bandwidth, the merrier), and greatly reducing system complexity as well as simplifying scalability. NVMe also enables direct GPU-to-storage (GPUDirect) access through DPUs bypassing CPUs (thus reducing CPU bottlenecks), and supports 64K queues with 64K commands per queue, vastly improving parallel processing, which is important for AI systems.

Proof-of-concept system

To validate this architecture, Seagate built a proof-of-concept system integrating eight NVMe HDDs, four NVMe SSDs for caching, an Nvidia Bluefield 3 DPU, and AIStore software, all running in a Seagate NVMe hybrid array enclosure.

The test machine demonstrated that direct GPU-to-storage access minimizes latency in AI workflows. Also, removing legacy SAS/SATA infrastructure simplified system architecture and increased storage efficiency. AIStore software dynamically optimizes data caching and tiering, which greatly enhances AI model training performance.

Also, Seagate says that the system can scale to exabyte levels when using NVMe-over-Fabric (NVMe-oF). Specifically, NVMe-oF integration enables seamless expansion of multi-rack AI storage clusters, which is crucial to scale efficiently (perhaps more importantly, seamlessly) across large data centers.

The trial confirmed that NVMe HDDs could support high-performance AI environments without requiring fully flash-based storage solutions, reducing costs while maintaining performance.

AI systems are driving exponential growth in data storage needs, with Existing architectures facing significant constraints. SSDs deliver high-speed performance but are financially unsustainable for long-term storage at this scale. SAS and SATA HDDs offer affordability but introduce complexity and latency due to reliance on host bus adapters (HBAs), proprietary silicon, and controller systems not optimized for AI’s high-throughput, low-latency requirements. Cloud storage options further complicate infrastructure with high WAN data transfer costs, unpredictable retrieval times, and latency spikes, which hinder AI processing efficiency. These limitations result in complex, costly, and inefficient architectures, slowing down AI adoption and performance.

Future AI storage needs

Nowadays, enterprises manage petabyte to exabyte-scale datasets for AI model training and inference. Going forward, their needs will increase, and this is where Seagate's solution to bring NVMe connectivity to HDDs and create a unified and efficient data center storage platform will shine.

From an HDD complexity point of view, adding NVMe to hard drives is not that expensive as the HDDs retain SAS/SATA physical connectors and their traditional 3.5-inch form factor. The only things that change are the addition of the NVMe protocol support and a PCIe interface to the controller (which probably costs pennies), as well as the development of firmware that supports NVMe features and capabilities like GPUDirect. Keeping in mind that the transition to NVMe/PCIe connectivity eliminates HBAs and complexity, small HDD cost price hikes will hardly be noticed by the industry.

However, as HDDs gain capacity, their IOPS-per-TB performance drops, and this may affect performance when working in AI clusters going forward (or will require more flash to mitigate). To that end, it is possible that in the future, dual-actuator HDDs, such as Seagate's Mach.2, will be preferable for AI clusters. Such drives are, of course, more expensive than regular single-actuator HDDs, but each such drive still costs less than two single-actuator HDDs, so this will not create any significant disruptions.

When?

One of the things that an avid reader would ask after learning the benefits of NVMe for HDDs is when such hard drives are set to hit the market. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell. Large companies prefer to have dual source supply for products like HDDs, which is why NVMe hard drives were developed as part of the OCP project. However, while Seagate already has NVMe hard drives, its rivals yet have to introduce their devices. When that happens, and all makers of hard drives can produce such products in volume, cloud service providers that address AI companies and workloads will start to adopt such products.

In a follow-up to the ongoing Seagate hard disk drive fiasco, German outlet Heise.de has uncovered a new method fraudsters use to sell used Seagate drives as new by manipulating their Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) values. This makes it increasingly difficult for consumers to detect tampered devices.

Traditionally, buyers could identify used hard drives by comparing the operating hours reported in the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data with those in the FARM logs. Fraudsters have altered the FARM logs' operating hours, making this comparison unreliable.

This advancement in deceptive practices presents a significant challenge for consumers trying to verify the authenticity of their purchases.

Consumers must now seek alternative ways to confirm whether a hard drive is new. Comparing the SMART operating hours with the FARM Power-On Hours (POH) is insufficient. Instead, checking the operating hours of individual heads can help determine if a drive has been previously used.

Another recommended method is examining the production date—new hard drives typically reach customers within six months of manufacturing. A significant delay between the production and purchase date could indicate potential fraud.

Additionally, the absence of a front-facing sticker displaying the serial number and barcode can serve as a red flag. Consumers can also use smartphone barcode scanners to verify the authenticity of a drive’s serial number.

This issue first surfaced in January when reports emerged that used Seagate Exos enterprise-grade hard disk drives (HDDs) were being sold as new. Investigations revealed that the fraudsters had erased usage logs, altered serial numbers, and modified labels to make the drives appear unused.

Tools like smartmontools could still detect extensive usage histories, with some drives running over 22,000 hours.

Further investigations traced the origin of these fraudulent drives to Chinese cryptocurrency mining farms, particularly those mining Chia. During Chia’s peak, HDD demand surged, causing shortages and price hikes. As the profitability of Chia mining declined, many farms shut down, flooding the market with second-hand drives. These drives, often with 15,000 to 50,000 hours of prior use, had their internal records altered to appear new. Seagate denied involvement, launched an investigation, and provided tools to help consumers verify the authenticity of their purchases.

Seagate has advised resellers to buy drives only from certified distribution partners to ensure authenticity. However, reports indicate that even some certified partners have inadvertently sold these fraudulent drives, highlighting supply chain vulnerabilities. The company emphasized that factory-recertified drives are clearly labeled and urged consumers to report any suspected fraudulent products directly to Seagate.

Chinese researchers have developed a high-density molecular storage system that uses organic molecules to store and encrypt data, reports Blocks & Files. Information is recorded and retrieved using a specialized atomic force microscope, which manipulates molecular states to store data, according to the description at Nature. While the technology can potentially enable ultra-high-density storage devices that reduce storage space requirements and power consumption (e.g., HDDs with capacities of 100TB and higher), short lifespan of atomic microscope tips remains a major obstacle.

Traditional HDDs store data on magnetic materials that change their properties using magnetic write heads. The molecular HDD technology works by storing and processing data using tiny molecules that change their electrical properties when exposed to voltage. The researchers used 200 self-assembled Ru LPH molecules arranged in a thin monolayer (SAM), where ruthenium ions switch between oxidation state and ion accumulation state, altering the material's conductance using a conductive atomic force microscope (C-AFM) tip. A (C-AFM) tip with a radius of 25nm writes and reads data by applying a small voltage to control these molecular changes, allowing for 96 different conductance states per unit (6-bit storage), which somewhat resembles multi-level cell NAND.

Since this system does not need strong magnetic fields and does not need to heat the medium, it operates with extremely low power consumption (pW/bit range) for reads and writes, which is potentially very efficient for large-scale data storage, according to researchers. However, since the scientists envision usage of their innovations in HDD form-factors with spinning media based on glass substrates, power consumption of actual drives will likely be comparable to that of traditional HDDs as motors will still consume power.

The researchers estimate that the SAM layer has an estimated thickness of ~ 2.54nm. If we assume that each Ru LPH molecule has a similar width and length on the order of a few nanometers, then 200 molecules arranged in a compact monolayer would occupy an area roughly in the range of tens of square nanometers (i.e., 10-20nm in width and length). Napkin math then shows that storing 6-bits of data per 200 self-assembled Ru LPH molecules translates into around 9.6Gbit/inch^2 (keep in mind that the napkin math could be wrong though), which is in line with what HDD makers expect from traditional hard drives heat-assisted writing and bit-patterned media (BPM). Such HDDs featuring HDMR technology are projected to emerge sometimes in the 2030s and enable capacities of over 120 TB per 3.5-inch HDD.

While HDMR has its own peculiarities (e.g., fully patterned medium using a lithography technology), this technology is at least understood by HDD makers, which potentially makes the molecular HDD research obsolete as by the time it may reach maturity and be ready for commercial applications, HDMR will be in mass production. However, the molecular HDD technology seems to have an ace up its sleeve.

Molecular HDDs can implement built-in encryption using bitwise XOR operations. This means the system can securely encode data at the molecular level, preventing unauthorized access. This was demonstrated by encrypting Mogao Grottoes mural images, where each pixel's information was transformed using XOR logic and later decrypted. Additionally, the molecular HDD can perform logical operations like AND, OR, and XOR directly within the storage unit, reducing the need for extra computing power.

Despite its potential, the system has a critical flaw, though - the short operational lifespan of the C-AFM tip. These tips last between 50 and 200 hours when used intermittently and just 5 to 50 hours in continuous mode, according to Blocks & Files. Such a limitation makes long-term, large-scale storage applications impractical unless more durable tips can be developed. If this issue is resolved, molecular storage could match or even surpass the density of next-generation HDDs and archival tape storage. However, for now, significant engineering challenges remain obstacles for it to become a viable alternative to existing storage methods.

A scheme involving the resale of used Seagate Exos enterprise-grade hard drives as new was uncovered earlier this month, but we have now learned that it reportedly affects not only Exos HDDs but also Seagate's IronWolf Pro HDDs, according to an investigation conducted by Lutz Labs from Heise.de. Fraudsters erase usage records, alter serial numbers, and modify labels to deceive buyers, but it is still possible to determine that the particular drive had been in use, and by now, there are multiple ways to detect such falsified HDDs.

Both Exos and IronWolf Pro are extremely reliable hard disk drives. Seagate's Exos HDDs are aimed at enterprises and hyperscale cloud service providers and are meant to operate 24/7, whereas IronWolf Pro is designed for enterprise-grade NAS environments that also work in 24/7 mode. While these drives share a lot in terms of hardware platforms, they have different firmware. Given the reliability, performance, and capacity points of IronWolf Pro HDDs, they are good candidates for use in Chia mining. As such, the current theory is that Chia miners are selling off used hard drives from mining farms, and it would make sense they may have both Exos and IronWolf Pro devices.

Falsified Seagate's Exos and IronWolf Pro hard drives are sold by retailers in different countries and generally look almost like new. The drives appear unused to the software because their internal usage logs, specifically SMART parameters, were wiped. However, a closer look at these drives may reveal slight dents and scratches on the chassis as well as scratches on their SATA connector, which are clear signs of previous use.

Also, the QR codes on counterfeit units have been tampered with. Instead of linking to Seagate's usual verification page, they redirect to a warranty check that does not display the serial number or storage capacity, making it harder to verify authenticity. Since the labels on the drives are false, there are slight variations in label alignment and scaling. Finally, tools like smartmontools that can read Seagate's FARM (field-accessible reliability metrics) values reveal that some had operated for over 50,000 hours.

So far, no similar cases have been reported for Toshiba or Western Digital. However, detecting tampering in these brands is more difficult since they lack Seagate's FARM values (which are only available on Exos, IronWolf, IronWolf Pro, and perhaps SkyHawk drives, according to Heise.de), which store extensive usage history.

Seagate has acknowledged the problem, stating that fraudulent practices involving IronWolf-series drives are not new. The company is conducting an active investigation into how these modified drives enter the market.

Today's deal is for those data backup enthusiasts who need high-capacity storage options to store their precious data. Not suitable for high-speed gaming, the traditional hard disk drives in these external storage solutions use long-lasting, reliable mechanical drives. So if you want something to accompany a NAS setup, a stand-alone solution, or even to shuck, this Seagate external HDD deal may be of interest to you.

Available from Best Buy, you can save $50 on the list price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 24TB HDD, now only $279. The large 24TB capacity means more room for your files, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds won't be horrendous.

The Seagate Expansion external HHD comes in a rugged black plastic chassis measuring about 7x2x5 inches with small feet on the bottom and a power and USB cable connection on the rear. This unit does need external power to run, and the AC power adapter is included in the packaging.

Included in the box with the Seagate Expansion Desktop 24TB HDD is an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable. With a purchase of this Seagate external HDD, you also have the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups.

Don't forget to look at our Best Buy coupon codes for February 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Best Buy.

Western Digital is set to introduce its first hard drives featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, and around 2030, this technology will enable the company to build 80TB–100TB HDDs. At that point, FePt-based granular media will start reaching its limits in terms of areal density. But Western Digital is already working on the next step for its hard drives: heat dot magnetic recording (HDMR) technology.

The HDMR is a next-generation recording technology that involves heat-assisted writing and bit-patterned media (BPM) that promises to achieve areal densities of around 8 Tb/inch^2 and beyond (according to Seagate) and to enable 10-platter HDDs with capacities of 120TB or higher. This technology is projected to be quite expensive as bit-patterned disks must be physically patterned using lithography or etching equipment in cleanrooms. Let us talk about this development in more detail.

All modern HDDs use platters featuring a granular magnetic coating. In such media, grains vary slightly in size, shape, and exact positioning, which introduces noise and interference and limits how tightly bits (and tracks) can be packed. To read tracks reliably, HDD makers use specially designed two-dimensional (2D) read heads, which consist of two read heads. Disks used in Western Digital’s 10-platter 24TB HDDs with conventional magnetic recording and ePMR 2 feature an areal density of around 1.2 Tb/inch^2. Seagate’s 10-platter 30TB hard drive, which uses HAMR and FePt media, has an areal density of around 1.5 Tb/inch^2. Seagate believes that granular FePt (or other high-anisotropy media) will enable the industry to achieve areal densities of 4 Tb/inch^2 or possibly even 6 Tb/inch^2.

At around 5 Tb/inch^2, it will become harder not only to read granular media reliably but also to write to it, which will push the industry to move on to ordered-granular (OG) media that incorporates patterning in one dimension (according to Seagate). OG media is expected to feature grains of uniform size, placed at precise, repeatable intervals. This allows the write head to form data bits with tighter boundaries and less noise. OG media will require new magnetic coatings, but its benefits will be significant—with uniform grains, magnetic properties become more predictable, reducing variations in write/read performance.

However, ordered-granular media is expected to support areal densities of up to approximately 7 Tb/inch^2. To reach 8 Tb/inch^2, bit-patterned media—which physically carves the disk into isolated bits using lithography or other processes—will be needed. BPM represents a more radical shift in manufacturing and entails significant production costs.

Combining the physical isolation of bits (from BPM) with energy-assisted writing (from HAMR) in HDMR can push areal densities far beyond what either approach alone can achieve. This may explain why Seagate does not reveal its areal density expectations for this technology. However, BPM requires a complex patterning process (e.g., nanoimprint lithography, e-beam lithography, or highly sophisticated etching), which is expensive. Additionally, local heating must be extremely precise — too much heat affects adjacent dots, while too little results in write failures — so new types of lasers will need to be developed.

Given all the complexities associated with HDMR, this technology will not come to the market anytime soon. Western Digital expects it to arrive sometime in the next decade, at which point it will enable HDDs with capacities well over 100TB. Interestingly, the latest iteration of Western Digital's roadmap no longer mentions ordered-granular media, unlike its 2022 version. It is possible that this time, the company intends to move directly to the technology that delivers the best results.

Storage mainstay Seagate has been churning out hard drives and SSDs for decades, as well as innumerable portable hard drives. But it’s largely left portable SSDs to its premium, Apple-focused LaCie brand. But today the company is announcing its Ultra-Compact SSD, an external solid-state drive available in 1TB and 2TB capacities that, with its slender design and built-in USB-C port, looks like a high-end flash drive, rather than a traditional portable SSD.

These kinds of drives, sometimes called SSD sticks, that pack SSD-like performance and a built-in USB port for cable-free use, have become increasingly common in the last couple of years, with the SK Hynix Tube T31 being our current favorite of what we’re still classifying as the best flash drives.

We’ll have to do some testing to find out if Seagate’s drive deserves a spot on the above list, but its pretty external shell aside, it has some interesting things going for it that may make it worth considering even if it isn’t the fastest performer. Like many other Seagate products, the Ultra-Compact SSD ships with three years of the company’s Rescue Data Recovery service, as well as six-month trials of cloud backup and image organization services. That’s not going to be important for everyone, but the data recovery service will certainly appeal many who’ve lost irreplaceable data to a drive crash in the past.

Dropbox Backup and Mylio Photos+ image organization and backup services.

Seagate-Ultra Compact SSD specs

Design of the Seagate-Ultra Compact SSD

With a single-piece aluminum silver shell (with plastic plugs on the font and back) and a 2.7 x 0.7 x 0.34 inches, Seagate’s drive looks and feels great. The cap over the USB-C port is all rubber, but it stays on much better than most plastic flash drive caps. And if you’re worried about scratching up the metal, the company also includes a gray rubber sleeve that matches the cap. That does add a little bulk to the drive, but it’s still small enough that it shouldn’t interfere with nearby ports like many competing high-end stick SSDs or flash drives.

Seagate points out that the drive is made up of at least 35% recycled materials (likely the aluminum), and it’s rated for drops up to 3 meters and sports IP54 dust and water resistance. Those specs are likely only while using the sleeve, but the drive feels plenty rugged without it for travel in typical conditions.

Software and included extras

The Seagate Ultra-Compact SSD ships with Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery service for three years, which families or users dealing with truly irreplaceable data will no doubt find appealing. That said, my personal history with drives like this tells me it’s far more likely that you’d lose a drive this than have it randomly fail and lock you out of data access. If you’re worried about losing things like family photos, a cloud backup of what’s on the drive might be more useful.

Speaking of that, the drive also ships with a six-month trial of Dropbox Backup and the Mylio Photos+ image organization and backup service. I don’t expect these are going to sway many potential buyers, but at least the trials aren’t the more typical 90-day variety. Six months will likely give you enough time to decide whether or not a service is worth paying for.

Comparison products

As a 2TB device in a flash drive form factor, the Seagate Ultra-Compact SSD doesn’t have a ton of direct competition, as many competing drives like the SK Hynix Tube T31 and Kingston DataTraveler Max) both top out at 1TB. The Transcend ESD310 does go up to 2TB though, and is selling for the same $179 price as the MSRP of the 2TB Seagate drive. And while it’s significantly wider, the ADATA SC750 is also available at 2TB for as little as $119. You’ll find all of these drives and more in our benchmark charts below.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Landing more or less in the middle of our competing cable-free flash drive and SSD comparisons, this isn’t a great showing for Seagate’s drive. But the drive is still much closer to the best drives here than the worst.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 10GB dataset. We copy 1,204 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Again the Seagate drive fails to impress here, at least on read speeds. But its write speed of nearly 512 MB/s puts it in 4th place among the other drives tested here. And 570 MB/s mixed-file reads is still is still a solid showing for a drive this small.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

While again not the fastest of the bunch, Seagate’s Ultra-Compact SSD manages a balanced read and write speed both easily above 1,000 MB/s (so above its rated speed) in this test. Only our favorite SK Hynix Tube T31 is markedly better on both fronts. But remember, its capacity tops out at 1TB.

On the flip side, there’s little positive to say about the Seagate drive’s small file write results here, other than they aren’t dramatically worse than the worst competing drives in our testing pool. If you’re looking for an external drive to directly run an operating system or demanding programs off of, there are lots of better options.

Bottom line

There’s lots to like about the design as well as the bundled data recovery features of Seagate’s Ultra-Compact SSD. And its performance, while far from class-leading, is still good enough to please mainstream consumers – especially those stepping up from a portable hard drive or an old space-cramped flash drive for backing up key files.

But apart from its compact size and spacious 2TB option, there’s little to set it apart from the pack unless you count its bottom-rung small file performance – which to be fair won’t matter much to those just looking to move files on and off the drive for backup or other sneakernet purposes. And when you consider Adata’s SC750 was faster on nearly all of our tests for $60 less, Seagate’s compact metal shell and three years of data recovery service need to do a lot of heavy lifting to make Seagate’s drive appealing.

Still, with a decent price drop over its initial MSRP, it could be worth considering. It has the nicest design of any of these stick SSDs I’ve used yet, and its performance is still good enough for my typical tasks, like moving test result files and game files between PCs.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

If you're looking for more storage, you've got to check out this deal on the Seagate Expansion Desktop 20TB HDD. It usually goes for around $279 but right now it's marked down to just $229 at Best Buy. This is a great option for anyone looking for more storage for something like a NAS, media center, or backups for game files. That said, if you want something dedicated to gaming you would be better off performance-wise looking for an SSD instead.

If you want to get an idea of how well this HDD compares against others on the market today, you should check out our list of best hard drives for 2025. We don't have this exact model on our list but we haven't had the opportunity to get our hands on it yet for a review. You will, however, find other Seagate drives on the list so we know for sure the brand is among the most reputable.

Today's offer applies only to the 20TB model but you will find other capacities ranging from as small as 4TB all the way up to 24TB. The Seagate Expansion Desktop 20TB HDD is USB 3.0 compatible. Because this is a desktop HDD, a power cable is required for it to operate in addition to the USB connection. It has a small form factor, measuring in at 7.04/1.65/4.92in and weighing just under 3lb at 2.59lb.

With this purchase, you receive the Seagate Expansion Desktop 20TB HDD, an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable, and the power cable. You also have the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups. The purchase includes a limited warranty from Seagate and is also supported by Best Buy's return policy.

Visit the Seagate Expansion Desktop 20TB HDD product page at BestBuy for more details and purchase options.

A Heise investigation of used Seagate data center-grade hard drives that are being sold as new has suggested that the drives originated from Chinese cryptocurrency mining farms that used them to mine Chia several years ago. Notably, this finding does not disprove Seagate's assertion that the fraudulent HDDs were obtained from channels that did not buy from official distributors.

The investigation suggests the used HDDs originated in China, likely from cryptocurrency mining farms that previously mined Chia. During Chia's peak, HDD demand surged, leading to shortages and price hikes. However, the economic payoff for Chia mining declined over time, leading to many farms shutting down and flooding the market with second-hand drives.

According to the report, these drives — many with 15,000 to 50,000 hours of prior use — had their internal records altered to appear unused. Seagate denies involvement; it has launched an investigation and now offers a tool to determine whether HDDs are shiny new or used (more on that later).

Over 200 reports of affected HDDs have surfaced worldwide, including cases in Europe, Australia, Thailand, and Japan. The fraudulent sales were first reported in January when it was discovered that supposedly new Seagate Exos datacenter-grade HDDs had been used for thousands of hours.

The HDDs' SMART parameters track drive usage, but those parameters were reset to conceal the actual wear. However, a deeper analysis using a query of the FARM (field-accessible reliability metrics) values reveals the true operational history of the drive, thus revealing if they have been used.

The affected retailers have responded differently to the scandal. Alternate claims neither the store nor its German suppliers knew the drives were not new, but it suggests customers contact the store if they discover their 'new' drives have been used. Galaxus has set up an online help page, while Proshop allows free returns and replacements. Some sellers state that warranty laws apply, while Wortmann has insisted on checking the HDDs before offering compensation.

Seagate has distanced itself from the issue, insisting it only distributes genuine new drives. It announced a full-scale investigation and has urged affected buyers to report fraud cases directly via fraud@seagate.com. The company believes the used drives were resold as new somewhere in the secondary market before reaching customers.

Buyers concerned about their purchases can verify the true HDD usage history. SMART parameters are sometimes unreliable, but the true operational time can be checked using FARM values. To do this, one has to use the Smartmontools application version 7.4 or higher (via command: smartctl -l farm /dev/sda) or Seagate's Seatools software.

Following a German outlet reporting that over fifty of its readers bought supposedly new Seagate hard drives that were actually used, the storage company tells Tom's Hardware that resellers need to buy from certified Seagate partners.

A week ago, Heise.de published a story about how one of its readers purchased two Seagate HDDs that were advertised as new, but were discovered to have been used for over 10,000 hours. Yesterday, the publication posted a follow-up article after receiving emails from over fifty other readers who claimed they had also been ripped off and given used hard drives instead of the new ones they thought they had bought.

“Seagate did not sell or distribute these fraudulent drives to resellers,” Seagate said in a statement to Tom’s Hardware. “We recommend that resellers only purchase drives from certified Seagate distribution partners to ensure that they purchase and sell only new or factory-recertified Seagate drives.” Unfortunately, Seagate declined to comment on the particulars of how these HDDs ended up in the hands of customers.

Seagate’s statement implies that these stores wouldn’t have been implicated in selling fraudulent hard drives if they had obtained them from the storage company’s certified partners. We can’t know for sure if resellers were actually doing this, but if any retailers had acquired the fraudulent drives from non-certified sources, it might have been a big mistake.

But curiously, Heise.de notes that of the dozen stores that its readers allegedly bought the fraudulent drives from, five were on the list of certified partners. That’s not a great look, and it raises some questions about where those five retailers were getting their Seagate drives from, if not a reputable distributor or Seagate itself.

The storage outfit also told us that “hard drives that have been refurbished and factory-certified by Seagate and resold as part of the Seagate Drive Circularity Program can be identified by the green-bordered white hard drive label and the designation ‘Factory Recertified.’”

Heise.de noted that some of its readers did receive refurbished drives, but they were used for at least 15,000 hours, according to a Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) query. Seagate told the German outlet that it resets the usage time according to FARM, so a refurbished drive that hasn’t yet been used shouldn’t report thousands of hours of wear. It would seem that these drives were used, refurbished by Seagate, used again, and then resold as freshly refurbished models.

Although Seagate says it had no part in selling or distributing the fake HDDs, it does want affected customers to reach out via Seagate’s Ethics Helpline.

Update 1/30/2025: Seagate has responded to our queries, pinning the issue on resellers not buying from official distributors. You can read about that here. 

Original Article:

German outlet Heise.de says it may have uncovered fraud after hearing from many of its readers who bought supposedly new Seagate hard drives, which turned out to be very much used.

Last week, the publication relayed the experience of one of Heise.de’s readers, who said he had bought a couple of 14TB Seagate Exos HDDs that seemed a little strange. The drives had some minor signs of wear on the outside, but after a quick look at the SMART stats, everything appeared normal. Later, though, the reader did a more thorough Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) test and discovered that one drive had already been used for 10,000 hours, and the other 15,000 hours.

Naturally, he returned the drives to the store he bought them from, an official Seagate retailer, and decided to replace them with two 16TB Exos HDDs purchased from a different store. These drives also turned out to be heavily used: 22,000 hours logged on each one.

Although both HDD sellers, neither of which Heise.de identified, claimed the Exos drives were simply brand-new retail models, Seagate told the publication that all four drives were actually OEM models. This meant that the normal five-year warranty did not apply like it would to typical drives bought at retail.

The initial retailer eventually stopped selling the 14TB and 16TB HDDs at some point and even canceled an order that Heise.de had anonymously placed. According to the report, Seagate is looking into how this happened, especially as one of the retailers has the storage corporation’s endorsement as an official retailer.

After this report was published, the floodgates opened, and over fifty other Heise.de readers said they experienced the exact same thing after buying apparently new Seagate HDDs. While 50 is a small sample size, the issue might be widespread since they bought their drives at a dozen different retailers, some of which are on Seagate’s official “where-to-buy” list. Some of the impacted retailers are quite large, such as Amazon and Mindfactory.

Most readers report having 16TB Exos drives, but others have the 12TB model, and a few have non-Exos HDDs ranging from 4 to 18TB. The time used ranges from 15,000 to 36,000 hours except for two 4TB HDDs, which were both used for about 50,000 hours. Heise.de checked a few drives at random to see when their warranties expired, and most of them were for 2026. Assuming a five-year warranty, that means they were first made and sold in 2021. All of the readers who reported receiving a used Seagate drive had bought it in the past few weeks, meaning the issue is relatively recent.

It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new. Although it’s not entirely clear if actual fraud is happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.

We reached out to Seagate for comment but haven’t received a reply yet.

Seagate does have a direct relationship with used hard drives. Nearly a year ago, the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. It also has a Hard Drive Circularity Program to find as many refurbish-worthy drives as possible, including Exos models. However, this store only sells in the US, so it doesn’t seem likely that it has anything to do with the current situation.

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."

The adoption of AI is driving explosive growth in data generation over the coming years. As available on-premise storage may not be enough for data generated by AI, cloud-based storage emerging as the top choice for businesses across industries, according to a global survey by Recon Analytics that was ordered and paid for by Seagate. According to the survey, storage demands will increase 2x in the next three years.

More data, more storage, more security

AI adoption is widespread, according to the survey, with 72% of surveyed businesses already using the technology and 28% planning to adopt it within three years. Cloud storage has emerged as the preferred medium for handling AI-driven data growth, with 65% of AI-related data stored in the cloud in 2024, projected to increase to 69% by 2028, according to the survey. 

When it comes to storage capacity, it gets quite interesting: Among organizations using over 100PB of storage, 87% save AI training checkpoints in either cloud environments or a combination of hard drives and solid-state drives. Frequent checkpointing is common, with 28% of companies saving daily and 43% saving weekly, which adds to the rising demand for storage, the report says. 

Businesses are also prioritizing longer retention of AI training data, which is considered as essential for improving model accuracy, according to the survey. A significant 90% of respondents believe that extended retention periods lead to better AI outcomes. Companies storing daily checkpoints indicated that 32% retain this data for over 12 months, while 29% retain it for six to 12 months. This focus on data longevity reflects the increasing importance of historical data in refining AI models. 

When it comes to infrastructure priorities, security ranks as the most critical component, with 25% of respondents placing it at the top of their list. Meanwhile, storage capacity trails at 18%. Other notable infrastructure concerns include data management, computing resources, network capacity, and regulatory compliance.

It's all about scale

Companies are also actively adapting to the growing storage demands brought on by AI adoption. Among the measures taken, 61% have adopted scalable cloud storage solutions, 56% have implemented advanced data management software, and 55% have upgraded their existing infrastructure. Additionally, 49% are leveraging data compression techniques to manage the increasing volume of AI-generated data. These strategies highlight the focus on scalable and efficient solutions to accommodate exponential storage growth. 

Data replication has emerged as another strategy for ensuring data integrity and optimizing AI outcomes. Approximately 80% of respondents consider replication either very or moderately important for their AI strategies, particularly among organizations with larger storage capacities. Companies using over 100PB of storage are more likely to emphasize replication as critical for maintaining the accuracy and reliability of their AI models. 

Looking ahead, cloud storage is expected to dominate as businesses continue shifting operations from on-premises setups to cloud environments. This trend is driven by the scalability, cost efficiency, and convenience of cloud-based solutions. 

As AI adoption becomes more pervasive, storage requirements are anticipated to grow exponentially as companies transition from trial phases to full-scale implementations. Frequent checkpointing, longer data retention, and replication practices will remain essential, underscoring the need for robust storage infrastructure and advanced management tools to support the future of AI-driven operations.

Seagate has expanded its LaCie Rugged series with the Rugged SSD Pro5, a portable SSD featuring Thunderbolt 5 connectivity for high-speed data transfer and enhanced compatibility. As per our headline, this new device is claimed to be able to transfer data at up to 6,700 MB/s. The SSD Pro5, announced at CES 2025, is designed to meet the storage demands of professionals working with large data files, such as raw images, video, and high-resolution audio.

There are not a lot of external SSDs offering support for Thunderbolt speeds. For example, the Samsung X5 that we tested, supports Thunderbolt 3 and offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,800 MB/s and 2,300 MB/s respectively. Or if you want something faster, the OWC Express 1M2 is another Thunderbolt/USB 4.0 external SSD (with a removable M.2 drive) that can go beyond 3,000 MB/s. However, neither of the devices comes even close to the performance that Seagate is claiming for the new LaCie Rugged device.

The Rugged SSD Pro5 offers read speeds of up to 6,700 MB/s and write speeds of up to 5,300 MB/s. This makes it the fastest external SSD on the market, provided you are connected to a Thunderbolt 5 compatible device. The SSD is said to feature a 50GB cache, and once that is consumed, performance drops to 5,000 MB/s read 1,800 MB/s write.

Essentially the drive is suitable for demanding workflows such as 8K video editing, large-sized media transfers, and large-scale data backups. The drive offers backward compatibility for devices using Thunderbolt 4 and USB 10/20/40Gbps USB-C hosts on Windows, macOS, and iPad Pro, offering a minimum 15W of power.

Durability remains a cornerstone of the LaCie Rugged series. The SSD Pro5 features an IP68-rated design that protects against water, dust, shocks, and drops of up to three meters. The drive is reinforced with a rugged rubber enclosure and is built with 45% recycled materials, for those who care about the environment.

Seagate will initially offer storage capacities of 2TB and 4TB, catering to diverse needs, from casual fieldwork to extensive professional projects. As with most of its products, the Rugged SSD Pro5 will come with Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Services in case of accidental data loss, alongside a limited five-year warranty. Pricing starts at $399.99 (2TB) and $599.99 (4TB) with global availability starting later this month.

Intevac, a maker of thin-film processing systems, has disclosed that it had landed orders from another customer for a machine that processes magnetic films for HAMR media. Intevac hasn't disclosed which company will field the drives, but logic dictates that either Toshiba or Western Digital is gearing up to begin producing hard drives based on the heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. 

Having landed orders for its HAMR-capable upgrade for its Lean 200 platform from the second major customer, Intevac now expects its HDD division to generate around $200 million in revenue over the next three years, fueled by the industry-wide adoption of HAMR technology. The company expects demand for high-capacity HDDs from data centers and the AI industry. 

Seagate's Mozaic 3+ HAMR-based HDDs use glass platters coated with a magnetic film, such as an iron-platinum alloy (FePt). Data is recorded by heating the magnetic film with a laser to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity. Since the magnetic coating of HAMR media is different from the magnetic coating of perpendicular magnetic recording media, Intervac's Lean 200 tool, used to process thin films, must be upgraded. 

Apparently, either Toshiba or Western Digital has ordered such upgrades, and initial upgrade installations have been successfully completed. Both companies have HAMR hard drives in their roadmaps.  

For now, Toshiba uses FC-MAMR (flux-controlled – microwave-assisted magnetic recording) technology for its MG-series HDDs that offer capacities of up to 24TB. The company intends to adopt MAS-MAMR (microwave-assisted switching – microwave-assisted magnetic recording) for its next-generation HDDs with 26TB – 30TB capacities. After that, the company plans to adopt HAMR, which will happen with 35TB hard drives. However, it is not completely clear when this will happen as the company is behind its HDD roadmap published in 2022. 

As for Western Digital, it did announce in mid-2023 that its HAMR-based HDDs would enter mass production in 1.5 years. This year, the company started sampling its 32TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs, which will ramp up in calendar 2025. It is possible that the company's next-generation HDDs that Western Digital will sample next year will indeed be HAMR-based, so it is about time for the company to start prepping its equipment for making HAMR HDDs.

Seagate’s biggest-ever hard drive is finally here, coming with 32TB of capacity courtesy of the company’s new HAMR technology (via Expreview).

It has almost been a year since Seagate said it had finally made a hard drive based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology using its new Mozaic 3+ platform. A HAMR HDD has long been anticipated since Seagate started experimenting with the technology in 2007. For over a decade, Seagate has predicted HAMR-based drives would be released within years, but these predictions fell apart year after year until now.

Exos drives based on Mozaic 3+ were initially released to select customers in small quantities, but now the general release is (nearly) here, thanks to mass production. Coinciding with this, Seagate silently published the product page for its Exos M HDDs, which includes a 32TB model using the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) storage format and a 30TB model using conventional magnetic recording (CMR).

There seems to be a little confusion at Seagate whether its HDD is the Exos M or Exos M 3+. The product page simply calls it the Exos M and a video published by Seagate’s official YouTube channel also says Exos M, but the URL says “exos-m-3-plus,” and the video title mentions the Exos M 3+. We’ve reached out to Seagate to clarify the naming situation.

Unlike the first Mozaic 3+ HDDs, Exos M drives are compatible with existing computers, which is pretty important to achieve mass adoption. Requiring new hardware to use the new HAMR hard drives would obviously be a significant obstacle and downside to upgrading. Whether that means Exos M is substantially different under the hood from the original Mozaic 3+ drives is unclear at the moment, though; the product page doesn’t offer very many details in that regard.

Seagate’s main competition in high-capacity HDDs at the moment is Western Digital, which launched ePMR-based drives in October, which included a 32TB model. Technically, Seagate released its 32TB HAMR drive first, but WD seems to have been the first to a general release. Either way, the two companies are about neck-and-neck in the capacity race, but Seagate might have the upper hand for future releases thanks to HAMR.

Seagate's Exos Mozaic 3+ hard drives featuring its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology have passed qualification at leading customers, and the company is ready to ship these HDDs in volumes. While previously the company shipped these drives inside its Corvault and Lyve systems and to select customers, volumes of these products were low. Now that some of the company's partners have qualified these devices, the company can kick off mass production. 

"Seagate has successfully completed qualification testing for its HAMR-based Mozaic drives with several customers within the Mass Capacity markets, including a leading cloud service provider," a statement in the company's Form 8-K filed with the SEC (and noticed by Blocks & Files) reads. "The Company expects to begin shipping initial HAMR product volume to this cloud customer in the coming weeks." 

It took Seagate over a decade to develop its HAMR technology, then years to design and build actual hard drives, refine the technology, and fix all bugs. The company once expected to ship its HAMR-based drives in 2020, but various teething problems delayed volume ramp to 2024 – 2025 timeframe. 

Since HAMR HDDs heat their media before recording and uses all-new plasmonic writers sub-system with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser, new Gen 7 Spintronic readers, brand-new glass platters with FePt magnetic film, new overcoats, and a new controller, this represents major technological changes. This is why Seagate's partners, particularly large cloud service providers, need to qualify these drives to make sure that they deliver required performance and reliability. And of course this takes time. So far, only one CSP and several significant customers have qualified Seagate's Exos Mozaic 3+ HDDs, but more to follow, so Seagate will ramp up production of HAMR drives in 2025. 

While HDDs based on the Mozaic 3+ platform require re-qualification, Seagate's Exos drives featuring HAMR are drop-in compatible with existing cloud servers, offering higher capacity, faster sequential speeds, and reduced power consumption per TB, which makes it easier to adopt them. However, they decrease the IOPS per TB performance, requiring cloud providers to address this to meet QoS and other standards, which will initially slowdown their adoption by some of Seagate's customers. 

It is necessary to note that Seagate expects demand for HDDs to increase in the coming years, so it is going to need to increase its unit volume shipments. Unfortunately, there is a problem with this as the company has hit hard times bringing its production tools back online. 

"Amid a strengthening HDD demand environment, Seagate has been focused on bringing existing production equipment back online to support customer demand and this process has taken longer than anticipated," another statement by the company reads. "As a result, production output for Seagate's fiscal third quarter ending March 28, 2025 will be lower than previously expected with an associated revenue impact of up to $200 million for the fiscal third quarter." 

Seagate will probably have enough capacity to ramp up its HAMR drives, but it looks like demand for other products may remain unfulfilled. 

With Mozaic 3+ HDDs about to enter mass production, it is necessary to note that Seagate is developing the Mozaic 4+ platform for 40TB+ HDDs, set for release in 2026, and the Mozaic 5+ platform for 50TB+ drives, expected in 2028 or later.

We've seen some incredible deals on hard drives during the Black Friday sale—and it's no different than Cyber Monday. Newegg is selling a very large NAS HDD for an attractive price—the Seagate Ironwolf Pro 20TB. For this Cyber Monday deal, the hard drive enjoys a 34% discount, bringing its original price from $500 to $329.99. As this will be a one-day sale event, this is your last chance to get a massive storage drive for a great price.

While the Seagate Ironwolf Pro is marketed as a NAS drive, it is also designed to offer top-tier performance in desktop PCs, so you can confidently use it on your PC. Having 20TB of space in a hard drive is handy for primary storage and backup. NAS drives are made to be operated in a NAS environment, either for single or multiple-bay units. This hard drive uses CMR technology, adding reliability and consistency to performance. It is rated with a 550TB per year workload rating and 2.5 million hours MTBF- all backed with a complimentary three-year Rescue Data Services it provides in-house and a 5-year warranty to give that piece of mind you'd want when you need to stack your NAS with 20TB per bay.

We reviewed the earlier model of the Seagate Ironwolf Pro TB—ST20000NT000—and compared it with the Seagate Exos with SATA III interface. Both performed the same, though Ironwolf Pro is marketed toward NAS owners for small and medium-sized businesses—those involved in video and photo production, workstations, and rendering—while Exos is for data centers and large-scale operations.

Having a very large storage capacity per bay enables users to store unedited and edited content, including RAW files of many projects. Of course, buying one or more of these isn't cheap. Now that you can get one at the lowest price, it is unlikely you'll get a good deal with this capacity during this year—and you will have to wait until next year's deals.

Ironwolf Pro has an advantage over non-Pro variants, particularly with warranty and in-house data recovery support. Seagate advertises it has an over 95% success rate, which is an added benefit as standard Ironwolf has a two-year coverage. Since this is an investment for many enterprises, having such an option for your data is invaluable, and you are getting a complete package. Should the three-year data recovery plan expire, you'll always have the 5-year warranty on the hardware.

We are working hard to find the best deals for you this Cyber Monday. If you're looking for other products, check out our Cyber Monday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you’re looking for a reliable and affordable hard drive to populate your new NAS or expand your existing one, today’s Cyber Monday deal will save you some money on your upgrade. The Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB NAS internal hard drive, designed for NAS RAID setups, is now at $223.99 on Amazon — an all-time low price.

Although it’s marketed as a NAS drive, our testing showed that the Seagate IronWolf Pro 14 TB is a great all-rounder, especially if you need a massive amount of space for storing your system data. Its 7200 RPM rating and 256MB cache allow it to hit 225 MB/s transfer speeds — while not as fast as M.2 NVMe SSDs, it’s good enough for storing large amounts of data for long periods. Furthermore, this drive uses Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) technology, which is faster and offers improved stability vs competing hard drives reliant on Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology.

Another thing that makes the IronWolf Pro 14TB a great option is Seagate’s confidence in the drive. It has a truly long-lasting five-year warranty, with Seagate providing Rescue Data Recovery Services for the first three years (with the company claiming a 90% recovery rate). It’s rare to see this kind of warranty, and if you’re looking for peace of mind, this could be more than enough for you to pick this HDD.

This drive made it on our list of the best hard drives of 2024, claiming the Best NAS Drive title. When we compared the IronWolf Pro to other options, like the WD Red Plus, Toshiba X300, or even the regular IronWolf hard drive, we figured that the IronWolf Pro is the best option at its regular price. And now that Seagate is putting it on a discount, the hard drive is so tempting to purchase for your NAS or PC.

We are working hard to find the best deals for you this Cyber Monday. If you're looking for other products, check out our Cyber Monday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you want to increase your bulk storage for pictures, videos, archives, and backups, a cheap and deep hard drive is always the best way to get the most bang for your buck. That's especially true during Cyber Monday when you can find great deals on hard drives, like the 10TB BarraCuda Pro that we found listed for $170, which is $110 cheaper than its previous all-time low pricing, which works out to a mere $17 per TB.

BarraCuda Pro has many advantages over the non-pro variant. The drive operates at 7,200 RPM and uses CMR tech that's faster than the lower-performing and lesser reliable SMR drives. The other major advantage is the peace of mind of a five-year warranty on the hard drive, along with a free two years of Rescue Data recovery services, meaning you get free data recovery if the drive fails. That's unmatched in the industry.  

Lower-cost mechanical hard drives typically use SMR tech, which is slower and delivers inconsistent performance. They also have a shorter warranty period and no data recovery services. 

We reviewed the Seagate BarraCuda Pro 10TB HDD and compared its performance against other mechanical HDDs. As the target use case is for data that you don't need at blinding SSD speeds, the drive's read performance is critical.

As you can see in our in-depth benchmarking, the BarraCuda drive has the chops to deliver strong and steady performance that matches or exceeds competing drives, like the Seagate IronWolf 10TB. The IronWolf 12TB is also currently on sale for $199.99, so you can choose between the two with the difference being the price and 2TB additional storage.

We are working hard to find the best deals for you this Cyber Monday. If you're looking for other products, check out our Cyber Monday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you're in the market for a high-capacity storage solution, the Seagate Expansion Desktop 14TB external hard drive, which originally began as a hot Cyber Monday deal, is still available with a significant discount on Best Buy. Designed for those who don’t necessarily need high speeds but rather require ample space for backups, multimedia files, or gaming libraries, this drive is an excellent option.

Seagate's external hard drive comes with USB 3.0 connectivity, which isn’t the fastest. But its sale price of $179 makes up for it, as you end up paying just 1 cent per gigabyte of storage. Additionally, the 7,200 RPM spindle speed and 192MB cache should offer stable performance for demanding tasks, whether for personal use, professional environments, or creative projects. 

Its design makes setup straightforward—just connect the drive to your Windows or Mac system, plug in the dedicated power supply, and it’s ready to use.

A feature that sets this drive apart is the inclusion of Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Services. This service typically covers recovery attempts for scenarios like accidental file deletions, virus attacks, or issues stemming from drive failure. If such problems arise, Seagate's team of experts will attempt to retrieve the lost data. Users can submit their affected drive to Seagate, where specialized tools and techniques are employed to recover the contents. This feature provides peace of mind for the consumer, ensuring you can recover data in case of accidental loss or hardware failure.

Head over to Best Buy to secure this deal before the sale ends. Whether for expanding your storage or safeguarding your data, the Seagate Expansion Desktop 14TB external hard drive seems like a worthy investment.