Seagate unveils 36TB HAMR hard drive: Mozaic 3+ extended
Seagate has the industry's highest-capacity HDD.

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.
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"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."
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.
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emike09 Good to see more progress in large HDDs. Still waiting for 20TB HDDs to come down in price. A lifetime of files adds up quickly and cloud storage is very expensive. I'm always surprised that there isn't more demand for large drives on a personal level.Reply -
A Stoner
You just stated the reason there is not more demand for large drives. Prices are too high.emike09 said:Good to see more progress in large HDDs. Still waiting for 20TB HDDs to come down in price. A lifetime of files adds up quickly and cloud storage is very expensive. I'm always surprised that there isn't more demand for large drives on a personal level.
I have 4 16TB drives, that was the largest I was willing to pay for and it was when they were on deep discount. I think I got 2 for $399 and then I got 2 more when they went on sale for 2 for $340 or something like that.
I currently see a no name MDD brand who has a 16TB 7200RPM 256MB cache 3 years 300TB warranty for only $160 at Walmart... Wonder if that is a scam... -
SomeoneElse23 You can get quality refurb 16TB drives with 5 year warranties for far less than $200 a piece.Reply
I personally use GoHardDrive. They have their own website and they are on NewEgg as well as Amazon (last I checked). -
3en88 There is no way they'll be used for any AI workloads. HDDs are way too slow, too fragile and too power hungry and Seagate will surely demand an exorbitant price for their shiny tech. They took way too long to bring HAMR to market but now it's too late this won't go anywhere.Reply -
Vanderlindemedia 3en88 said:There is no way they'll be used for any AI workloads. HDDs are way too slow, too fragile and too power hungry and Seagate will surely demand an exorbitant price for their shiny tech. They took way too long to bring HAMR to market but now it's too late this won't go anywhere.
You be suprised how fast you can make HDD based storage through the use of SSD caching. -
SomeoneElse23 3en88 said:There is no way they'll be used for any AI workloads. HDDs are way too slow, too fragile and too power hungry and Seagate will surely demand an exorbitant price for their shiny tech. They took way too long to bring HAMR to market but now it's too late this won't go anywhere.
There is plenty of market for large spinning storage.
Else the big storage makers wouldn't be releasing larger and larger storage? -
OldAnalogWorld
How is this possible in HDD? If there is wear of the protective layer of the surface of the plates and the mechanism of the heads and themselves, no "refurb" will be of high quality, except for a complete replacement of all the stuffing in the case, which will cost more than making a new disk on the conveyor.SomeoneElse23 said:You can get quality refurb 16TB drives with 5 year warranties for far less than $200 a piece.