Hard drives remain a vital component in building high-capacity storage solutions, especially in the data center. IT Home reports that Seagate is continuing to break barriers on how many TBs can be stored on a single hard drive and has achieved a whopping 6.9TB per platter in its laboratory, making 55TB to 69TB hard drives a possibility for the first time.
Seagate's experimental 6.9TB platter boasts more than double the capacity of platters it uses in official products right now. Outgoing models such as Seagate's 30TB HAMR HDDs use 10 3TB platters to reach maximum capacity. With 6.9TB platters, Seagate will be able to build drives with more than double the capacity of its outgoing drives in the same form factor.
Seagate is leveraging its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology to deliver its 6.9TB platter. If you want to check out how Seagate's HAMR technology works, check out our previous coverage. In a nutshell, HAMR uses heat-induced magnetic coercivity to write to a hard drive platter. In Seagate's outgoing drives, this tech is combined with Mozaic 3+ to reduce the media grain size compared to typical HDD platters.
However, these 6.9TB platters are still in development and are not planned to be used for another 5 years. Seagate's roadmap reveals that 6.9TB platters won't be used in official products until 2030. In the meantime, Seagate is working on developing 4TB, 5TB, and 6TB platters that will enter production in 2027, 2028, and 2029, respectively. But the company won't be stopping there; it projects that it will have 7TB to 15TB platters available from 2031 onward. Assuming nothing changes, Seagate could likely have petabyte-sized hard drives before 2040.
Seagate's continuous improvements in hard drive capacity will be vital to keeping up with the increasing demand for hard drives. Despite the rise in SSD maturity, hard drives are still the backbone of the world's long-term storage, thanks to better reliability and far superior storage capacity per drive (for the most part) and storage capacity per dollar. Hard drive reliability has only improved as the AI boom gobbles up hard drive orders, leaving HDD manufacturers with 2-year backorders on hard drives alone.
Luckily, this problem has mostly been regulated to datacenter drives (for now). If you are looking to pick up a new hard drive right now, be sure to check out our best Black Friday HDD deals for 2025, which include a 24TB Seagate BarraCuda discounted to just $239.99 (at the time of writing).
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