Seagate: 22TB and 24TB HDDs Launching Soon, 30+TB HAMR Follows in Q3

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Seagate to release 25TB and 30TB hard drives this year.

Seagate
(Image credit: Seagate)

Seagate plans to radically increase capacity of its range-topping hard drives this year. In Q1 or Q2 the company intends to introduce 22TB and 24TB HDDs based on its latest platform, but already in the third quarter Seagate is set to release the industry's first hard drive featuring its heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology with a capacity of over 30TB.

30TB HAMR HDD Is Nearly Here, 50TB Is on Horizon

Seagate has been pinning loads of hopes on HAMR for a long time and has been shipping HAMR-based HDDs to select customers for evaluation for several years now.  The company will release its first mass-market hard drives featuring its 2nd generation HAMR platform in the third quarter, the company said at its earnings call this week. 

"We now expect to launch our 30+ TB platform in the June quarter, slightly ahead of schedule," said Dave Mosley, chief executive officer of Seagate, at the conference call (per SeekingAlpha). "The speed of the initial HAMR volume ramp will depend on a number of factors, including product yields and customer qualification timelines. However, we plan to use our systems business to quicken the pace of learning and time-to-yield." 

For now, Seagate hasn't revealed much about its initial HAMR platform, including the number of platters it can install into its drive. Meanwhile, with capacities of 30TB and higher, the company will be able to offer its customers rather unprecedented storage density for 3.5-inch HDDs. The storage specialist admits that the share of HAMR-based hard drives will not be too high this year, but it is going to increase as yields of HAMR media and HAMR heads increase. 

Initially, the company will use HAMR disks and heads to make its ultra-premium highest capacity nearline drives aimed at hyperscale cloud datacenters. But eventually the new media and heads will be used for mid-range and even entry-level high-capacity HDDs to reduce their manufacturing costs and increase Seagate's margins. 

"I think this year, [the share of HAMR HDDs] will probably still be relatively low," said the head of Seagate. "The faster we can get the yields up and scrap and all the costs that we can control down on the heads and media, then the faster we will be accelerating. I think that will happen in calendar year 2024, and calendar year 2025 we will just continue to accelerate. The highest capacity points will be addressed, […] also these midrange capacity points […]."

Seagate

(Image credit: Seagate)

While 30TB HDDs are nearly here, Seagate says that it has also managed to cram 5TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk in the lab, which opens doors to HDDs with capacities of 50TB and higher (assuming that the drives use 10 platters or more). For now, such disks are only used on spinstands, but as the company learns more about them, they will be moved to prototype drives and eventually to commercial HDDs. 

The company's publicly available roadmap indicates that Seagate intends to deliver 50+ TB hard drives in calendar 2026, so the HDD maker has plenty of time to polish off its 50TB media for mass production.

22TB and 24TB HDDs Due Shortly

While HAMR will enable rapid growth for Seagate's HDD capacities in the coming years, the company continues to refine its hard drives featuring perpendicular/conventional magnetic recording (CMR/PMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technologies. Either in Q1 or Q2 the company will release its 10-platter CMR/PMR HDDs with 2.2TB disks and a 22TB capacity. SMR version of such drives will further increase capacity to 24TB for those willing to use shingled magnetic recording. 

The new 22TB CMR/PMR and 24TB SMR HDDs will serve as the company's top-of-the-line workhorses that will replace 20TB CMR/PMR and 22TB SMR hard drives from this position. 

"Our 20TB product features 2TB per disk capacities and we have started to ramp the volume of 22TB products deployed on 2.2TB per disk capacities," said Mosley. "The 20+ TB platform is based on traditional PMR technology and some customers are choosing to enable SMR technology as an additional feature that slightly increases the drives capacity for certain applications. [… ] We are executing plans to deliver another 10% gain in per disk capacity for this PMR platform to offer drives in the mid- to upper 20TB range."

First Loss in Years

While Seagate's product roadmap for the rest of the year looks extremely promising, the company's quarter ended on December 30, 2022, is nothing but depressing as the company reported its first loss in years. 

During the second quarter of its fiscal 2023, Seagate earned $1.887 billion in revenue, down 39.5% year-over-year, and lost $33 million. By contrast, the company's earnings reached $3.116 billion in Q2 FY2022 and its net income totaled $501 million.

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • emike09
    At least we're seeing HDD's continue to increase in capacity, while SSDs are stagnating at 4TB. Sure there's some 8TB drives out there for a massive premium, but overall, the only thing we're seeing in the SSD world is performance surpassing what the average high-end consumer needs, and we're all sitting here starving for decend SSD capacities that have decent speeds.
    PCI-e 5 speeds are insane, but literally 1% of high-end users need those speeds. Give us affordable 8TB+ SSDs that have great PCI-e 4 speeds, at an affordable cost.
    Reply
  • Kamen Rider Blade
    emike09 said:
    At least we're seeing HDD's continue to increase in capacity, while SSDs are stagnating at 4TB. Sure there's some 8TB drives out there for a massive premium, but overall, the only thing we're seeing in the SSD world is performance surpassing what the average high-end consumer needs, and we're all sitting here starving for decend SSD capacities that have decent speeds.
    PCI-e 5 speeds are insane, but literally 1% of high-end users need those speeds. Give us affordable 8TB+ SSDs that have great PCI-e 4 speeds, at an affordable cost.
    Also, as SSD's increase bit density, write durability is going down along with it.

    Read/Write speeds aren't improving as Bit Density is increasing once you get past the Flash Storage Buffer area.
    Reply
  • pointa2b
    emike09 said:
    At least we're seeing HDD's continue to increase in capacity, while SSDs are stagnating at 4TB. Sure there's some 8TB drives out there for a massive premium, but overall, the only thing we're seeing in the SSD world is performance surpassing what the average high-end consumer needs, and we're all sitting here starving for decend SSD capacities that have decent speeds.
    PCI-e 5 speeds are insane, but literally 1% of high-end users need those speeds. Give us affordable 8TB+ SSDs that have great PCI-e 4 speeds, at an affordable cost.

    I think its simply because of a lower demand of larger capacity drives keeping in mind their current $/GB. Theres SSDs out there with tens of terabytes of capacity and quite fast/durable, but they use stuff like u.2 ports, are aimed at enterprise/datacenters, and cost thousands.

    As $/GB continues to drop for SSDs, I think it will redefine how consumers view them (not just as a fast relatively lower capacity primary drive).
    Reply
  • brandonjclark
    Man! I JUST bought a bunch of 8tb drives, too!*

    *really, I did
    Reply
  • Fates_Demise
    emike09 said:
    At least we're seeing HDD's continue to increase in capacity, while SSDs are stagnating at 4TB. Sure there's some 8TB drives out there for a massive premium, but overall, the only thing we're seeing in the SSD world is performance surpassing what the average high-end consumer needs, and we're all sitting here starving for decend SSD capacities that have decent speeds.
    PCI-e 5 speeds are insane, but literally 1% of high-end users need those speeds. Give us affordable 8TB+ SSDs that have great PCI-e 4 speeds, at an affordable cost.

    Um... look at enterprise ssds dude. They have ones over 25TB in size.
    Reply
  • blitzkrieg316
    Fates_Demise said:
    Um... look at enterprise ssds dude. They have ones over 25TB in size.
    For 10 bagillion dollars ya... If a data centre can use 30-50TB for 1/10th the cost it's much more practical, save companies like Google and MS. Hell, a 30TB drive at home covers ALL movies, games, storage, etc. unless you excessively download everything to prove a point and likely watch/use none of it...
    Reply
  • lmcnabney
    Spinning rust hasn't kept pace with SSD price drops and speed increases.

    Two years ago I got a great deal on a 4TB 5900rpm drive to add to my server for $60. That same drive is now $82. The absolute cheapest I can find is $57 so after two year the spinning rust hasn't dropped a bit in price.

    Compare that to SSDs and you know that you are getting ripped off.

    The uncompetitive (only three manufacturers globally) HDD market is doing what the GPU market is. Old capacities are keeping their prices years after release and newer higher capacities are pushing prices ever higher.
    Reply
  • Fates_Demise
    lmcnabney said:
    Spinning rust hasn't kept pace with SSD price drops and speed increases.

    Two years ago I got a great deal on a 4TB 5900rpm drive to add to my server for $60. That same drive is now $82. The absolute cheapest I can find is $57 so after two year the spinning rust hasn't dropped a bit in price.

    Compare that to SSDs and you know that you are getting ripped off.

    The uncompetitive (only three manufacturers globally) HDD market is doing what the GPU market is. Old capacities are keeping their prices years after release and newer higher capacities are pushing prices ever higher.

    hdd companies are cutting production from lower demand which will keep prices up.
    your comparing the wrong capacity dude, the drives metal frame is pretty much a set cost that cannot go down in price, so when you look at cheap low capacity drives they are not gonna go down much. For instance you said a 4TB was $60. Doing a fast look online right now I can buy a 12TB enterprise drive for $110. Much better value. So stop looking at the cheapest drives and go compare price per TB across many sizes.
    material/labor costs worldwide have spiked also which keeps cost up a but. Ssds have less material overall.
    Reply
  • lmcnabney
    Fates_Demise said:
    hdd companies are cutting production from lower demand which will keep prices up.
    your comparing the wrong capacity dude, the drives metal frame is pretty much a set cost that cannot go down in price, so when you look at cheap low capacity drives they are not gonna go down much. For instance you said a 4TB was $60. Doing a fast look online right now I can buy a 12TB enterprise drive for $110. Much better value. So stop looking at the cheapest drives and go compare price per TB across many sizes.
    material/labor costs worldwide have spiked also which keeps cost up a but. Ssds have less material overall.
    Where can you buy an enterprise HDDs for under a penny per GB? PCPartsPicker shows the cheapest HDD is still 1.4 cents per GB. The cheapest 12TB available is the Ironwolf for for $190.

    The material cost in a HDD (case, connector, board, arms/heads, cache, magnets) is very low. Just a few bucks. The platters add a couple bucks each. That 12TB drive cost maybe $15 to manufacture and package. The cost to manufacture per GB plummets as capacity goes up.

    Seriously, if you have a link to a 12TB enterprise drive with warranty for $110 I would love to get it.
    Reply
  • DSzymborski
    $190 is a good price and represents a significant decline in $/GB. The 12 TB here, when released, was listed at $430.

    That the materials cost $15 -- assuming that is true for the sake of argument -- isn't all that useful because a lot goes into product development, labor, and supporting the hard drive, not just the simple cost of materials.
    Reply