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.

Update 5/4/2026 11:25am PT: Added comment from Temu spokesperson.

A Reddit user who gambled a mere $20 on a 4TB external HDD from Temu has revealed, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that the drive was actually a scam, showing that it contained nothing but innards of a microSD card reader with a generic memory card attached to it. According to the post on the subreddit r/pcmasterrace, they decided to risk purchasing the item off the marketplace because it only cost $20. By comparison, the 4TB variant of the WD My Passport external hard drive costs around $165. The SSD version, one of our best external SSDs, costs $719.99 on Amazon. It’s obvious that the item is fake, but since the absolute dollar value is minimal for the user, they decided to gamble on it.

"Temu requires sellers to ensure their products match their listings accurately and removes listings that do not meet platform standards. Buyers who receive items that do not match their description are eligible for a full refund under the Purchase Protection Program," a Temu spokesperson tells us.

I got a 4TB external drive off Temu and this is what they sent lmao from r/pcmasterrace

In fact, the scam was so obvious that Temu refunded the purchase "suspiciously easily." Instead of finding a 2.5-inch SATA drive inside its plastic casing, all they found was a microSD card reader hot-glued to the back. It’s unclear if they attached it to their PC to see if it reported and delivered the claimed 4TB capacity. This is unlikely, though, because the highest capacity microSD card readily available on Amazon is only 2TB and costs at least $289.99.

Even then, some scammers tamper with the storage firmware to make it show a larger capacity than what’s available. One reliable way of finding this out is through testing software like the H2testw utility or by filling up the drive with your files, only to discover that your data has overwritten itself because of the lack of space.

Fake drives have been around for so long, but it’s proliferating even more now because the AI-driven chip shortage is causing both SSDs and HDDs to skyrocket in price. This fake drive is easy to spot, as it probably feels lighter when compared to a real hard drive, but some dupes do a good job in copying the look of the original, and you’ll only discover that it’s not what it says it is when you plug it into your PC. Even then, some knockoffs offer performance close to what you’d expect, so much so that you’d only know it’s a fake if you know what you’re looking for.

Temu is known for selling cheap knockoffs; that’s why many Reddit users do not recommend purchasing storage drives and other sensitive electronics off the website. Nevertheless, it does come through sometimes, like this user who received a free RTX 3060 GPU, although they’re yet to see if they really hit the jackpot.

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.

A Reddit user took to the social media platform to complain about Toshiba, which, they said, refused to honor the warranty on a 20+ TB enterprise hard drive. The documents Tom’s Hardware examined indicate that Toshiba refused the warranty replacement on the grounds of no available stock and a possible wait time of one year for a replacement 24TB model.

According to the r/DataHoarder post, the company where the user worked bought several 20+ TB hard drives a couple of months ago for their storage array. When one of the drives failed, they returned it to Toshiba, only to be told that their only option was a refund at the original purchase price. The company didn’t offer to replace the broken hard drive with a new one from their stock, meaning they’ll have to purchase a new drive at a significantly higher price today.

This is definitely a disappointment for any buyer, especially in the corporate setting, as they don’t often base their purchase decisions solely on price. Instead, they consider reliability, longevity, and the manufacturer's guarantee of support. Refunding an item at its original purchase price makes sense for the company. However, most users feel that the least a PC manufacturer can do is replace it with the same component (or a similar one if it’s no longer available), even if it’s more expensive.

“I'm guessing they saw dollar signs from the AI bubble and sold off their safety stock or are seeing an unusually high failure rate in those drives,” 615wonky said on their post. “Both reasons to stay far away.”

Other manufacturers are also taking extreme measures as the AI-driven shortage of memory and storage chips is pummeling the PC market. Another Reddit user had an issue with the Silicon Power RAM they bought, being slapped with a 15% depreciation fee for returning defective RAM sticks. This wouldn’t have mattered much if the prices of memory modules stayed flat, but the fact that a pair of 8GB DDR5 RAM sticks now costs more than $200 (compared to less than $55 for pre-shortage prices) means that the money they received from the return isn’t enough for even one 8GB DDR5 memory module.

Back in February, we had the opportunity to attend WD's (formerly Western Digital) Innovation Day 2026, where the company outlined its plans for the future. Notably, the company discusses its split from SanDisk, and it's expectations for the future, including discussion around its HAMR roadmap, in addition to its ePMR discussions, and fielding questions from analysts.

Like many of our previous event transcripts, this is almost exactly what we heard at the press-only event. As such, some elements have been lightly edited for flow and clarity. If you have not had the chance to check out other Tom's Hardware Premium transcripts, be sure to check out our coverage from CES and GTC 2026.

Ambrish Srivastava: I guess we have to go first with Amit in that case, so just a quick — we have mic runners, there's four of us, we'll start off with Amit, and then we'll queue up Aaron Rakers, right next to Amit. Ah, name and firm, please.

Amit Daryanani: Thanks a lot; Amit Daryanani, Evercore. Thanks for the presentation. The two things that stood out, and I'd love to get your perspectives on this; one is the cost-per-bit decline—if you could just talk about how you are thinking about cost-per-bit declines over the next three to five years of the roadmap. Is that different in ePMR versus HAMR? Just, if you can walk through that math a little bit.

And then, Irving, for you, it seems like you want to commit towards an ePMR and a HAMR roadmap at least through 2028; if all customers care about is 'the highest capacity', 'the most reliable at scale', why have a dual technology roadmap when it seems like HAMR is going to work out? Just walk through the dynamic given what customers are asking for. Thank you.

Irving Tan: That sounded like more than one question, in one question. [laughing] So, let me try to address the cost-down question for a second. Obviously, you know, the cost down that was delivered, dollar per teraybte, has been about ten percent over the last few quarters. Obviously we're not guiding to anything beyond that, but more importantly, what you've heard Ahmed, even as we deliver a roadmap that has both HAMR and ePMR, the common platforming that we've done to ensure that it's common mechanicals, the fact that we've internalized our own laser capability, gives us the confidence that we'll be able to maintain a very competitive cost-down trajectory going forward.

In relation to the roadmap — and I think Ahmed, it's cool for you to join in — obviously what we want is to give our customers very smooth transitions, and you've heard how risk-adverse they are to transitions given the size and scale and the importance of storage to their business. So we'll continuously work with our customers to make sure that the economics work for them, the economics work for us. The reality is, as we go beyond, say 60, 70, we will have to transition to HAMR. As we get to 80, 90, 100 terabytes, there is — at some point, the laws of physics will require us to transition to HAMR, but we want to do it in a way that makes economic sense, that manages risk, gives our customers smooth transitions, AND equally important, makes economic sense for us, as well. The benefit we have is that we're able to do both whilst delivering the strong financial performance that Kris read off.

Ambrish Srivastava: I'm going to go to Aaron and after that we'll come to Erik over here.

Aaron Rakers: Thank you, Ambrish. Aaron Rakers, with Wells Fargo. First question on the laser, the integration of the laser technology, I'm curious — and I apologize if I missed this — can you help us appreciate when that inserts itself in the roadmap? Is that a point of gross margin leverage, are there any kind of further details on how we should think about that technology path as we go to the HAMR?

And then Kris, for you, I just want to ask, I mean — first of all, congrats on the Sandisk ownership, it's $5.075 billion [laughing] I'm curious if, as we pivot now to this significant free cash flow generation that appears to be supported by this model, how do you actually structurally think about your capital structure? You know? Are you wanting to build cash in a balance sheet, what's the appropriate level of cash to run the organization; I'm just trying to get a frame for how you think about excess cash generation because you clearly are going to have a lot of capacity for capital return; I'm curious about how you, longer-term, think about that. Thank you.

Irving Tan: You can go ahead and take the laser question.

Ahmed Shihab: Yeah, well — I was hoping that Kris would answer the laser question too. [laughing]

Kris Sennesael: I can, but please go ahead. [laughing]

Ahmed Shihab: Oh, thank you. The laser technology, it's — it is smaller, it is cheaper for us to produce, so that is going to be useful and accretive to the business, and we are starting a slow ramp in introducing it. So it's not going to be a lightswitch transition because we want to be careful about when we transition that. So we'll start that transition right around the 48-, 40-terabyte range, and even a little bit before that.

Kris Sennesael: In terms of capital structure; so, assuming a successful monetization of the Sandisk shares, we're going to end up with $1.6 billion dollars of debt on the balance sheet, which is the convert. At the appropriate time, I want to get rid of the convert, but still keep about $1.6 billion dollars of debt on the balance sheet. So yes, we have strong free cash flow; the intent is to return all of that free cash flow back to the shareholders.

Ambrish Srivastava: We're going to go to Erik and then we'll tee up Asiya over here, and then Wamsi after that.

Erik Woodring: Awesome. Good morning guys. I'll rebut Aaron and say, remember you guys once had 23 million shares of Sandisk, and— [laughing]

Irving Tan: Hindsight is 20/20, Erik. [group laughing]

Erik Woodring: Very true. No, thank you guys for all the content here. I just want to break it down, which is — we've gone through a lot of different configurations and platforms that you're introducing; they all have 11 platters on them. Your competitor is coming out with HAMR with 10 platters. How do you remain price-per-terabyte, price-per-exabyte competitive; how do you continue to push down cost per terabyte when we have that kind of differential. What are you doing differently that allows you to remain competitive despite that one extra platter per drive.

Irving Tan: So maybe I'll just make one big comment and then I'll leave it to Ahmed. You saw his presentation, he had two very important points. One is we're going to continue to focus on increasing areal density. Right? So, if you look at it, we're going to deliver a 40 terabyte ePMR, as example, that's only 11 platters; that's close to 4 terabytes a platter. When we get to 60, we'll introduce another platter. So that's 5 terabytes per platter. So we're increasing areal density. Right? So then on HAMR, we said we would get up to 10. By 2029?

Ahmed Shihab: 28.

Irving Tan: 28, sorry. He's even ahead of me.

Ahmed Shihab: He's sandbagging. [crowd laughing]

Irving Tan: So, if you talk about what the rest of the industry has been saying, they're saying we're going to get up to 10 terabytes per platter. So we're equal or potentially, timeline-wise, going to be ahead of them in areal density. Now, what we are doing is to increase the capacity of the drives beyond areal density. So we're going to be at parity or even ahead on areal density per platter, but we have that ability because of the innovative work that the teams have been doing, the laser technology, to — within the same drive — to increase the number of platters. Alright? So that's how you get to a potential 140. So we feel actually, from a drive economics standpoint, actually, our dollar-per-terabyte is going to be even more competitive going forward.

Erik Woodring: Okay. And maybe just a quick followup, going back whatever it is, just 12 months ago to the last Analyst Day, I think we were setting a floor for op margins and gross margins at 24% and 38%; I know we're kind of dreaming the dream now, which is exactly what we were all asking for, but if we do think about the other side of that, where do we think about the potential floor and margins, is it any different than a year ago or has that changed as well? Thank you so much guys.

Kris Sennesael: No — so the financial model that I put out there, as I said, it's a target model, so we still have some time to go and some work to do to get to the targets, but I have confidence that once we hit those targets over the next three to five years, we will be able to continue to operate the business at or above those values.

Ambrish Srivastava: We'll come to Asiya and then after that Wamsi.

Asiya Merchant: Thank you, Asiya Merchant, Citigroup, and thank you for all the content; that was great. Just one for Kris, and if I can, one for Irving as well. Kris, you know, when you talk about stable pricing, I know right now it's a great environment, just walk us through why stable pricing makes sense beyond maybe the next few quarters where you have great visibility; if there's a down cycle, why do you still think stable pricing could probably prevail?

And then one for Irving; Irving, on the earnings call you also talked about quantum computing. I didn't get to hear anything about it, maybe it's just the timeframe here that we're talking about. Just walk us through that innovation that you've talked about and how does that fit into the broader roadmap? Thank you.

Kris Sennesael: So, as it relates to pricing, for me, pricing is fully tied to how much value do we deliver to our customers, right? It has nothing to do with tightness in the supply chain or strength in the cycle or weakness in the cycle. It's "how much value do we provide to our customers," and moving to higher-capacity drives with better areal density, with better performance, is what our customers want, it's what our customer needs, and delivers a tremendous amount of value. That's why we are going to remain disciplined in terms of pricing, no matter where we are in the cycle. And that's why I have high confidence in this stable pricing environment.

Irving Tan: Yeah. Maybe I'll just add onto that. I've been in regular communication with our customers, with one of the big ones, just two weeks ago — I mean, what they really want from us is predictability in pricing. It's very hard for them to be designing their datacenter architectures two, three years, five years out when you have the volatility that we're seeing in some of the storage tiers. So what we're really focusing is on continuing to deliver value to them, and as Kris said, to be able to share that value, so that we can deliver that stable pricing. Obviously in the near term we're seeing mid-to-high single digits, but in the long term model, a stable pricing environment.

In relation to your second question on Quantum and — we didn't want to distract from all the exciting things. We had to stay on the the drive itself, and obviously as I mentioned, we look to have regular Innovation Days to keep you posted on what we're doing. But the reason I mentioned it — because we're not building the business just for today. We are also incubating new growth vectors for the company for tomorrow, and that's why I took a moment to highlight the rich core capabilities and IP that we have. If you look up what the next, probably, tech growth driver beyond AI; quantum represents a huge opportunity going forward. And our magnetics capability, our magnetics junction technology capability, our nano-fabrication technology, by which we build our drives, positions us very well to deliver cost-economical qubits to support quantum computing going forward. And that's kind of why we made the strategic investment into Qolabs — not because it's a financial investment, but we're also a key technology partner to them, to be able to bring quantum computing economically at scale, just like we have done for the hard drive industry.

Ambrish Srivastava: Great. And while you get ready for a question, I want to widen our horizon and see who's in the back as I've been sticking with the front-benchers but we'll go with Wamsi and—

Wamsi Mohan: Thank you, Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America, I appreciate you guys doing this, and Kris, love your comment on 'no ceiling to numbers,' that's definitely encouraging here. I guess the two questions I have are one, you noted smooth transition across recording technologies and looks like relative to last year your EPMR road map is significantly different. I think last year you said ePMR might end at 36, now we're saying 60 plus, so very different. How do you think that impacts the adoption of HAMR at your customers just given the fact that so far you've seen tremendous success with EPMR, and that might be an easier transition at higher capacities. So do you think it impacts the transition to HAMR from a WD perspective?

So that's my first question, and second question is, there was a lot of innovation you shared here in terms of performance, improving performance, in terms of power, in terms of IOPS. Just curious how you think about this could expand the TAM for Western Digital, and does that — when this comes around does it accelerate your growth rate even further? Thank you.

Ahmed Shihab: So the — when we talk to our customers, one of the things they're really very clear about is they really don't like those step up transitions, and they want to have that smoother ramp in terms of equivalent capacity so they can choose when to ramp the capacity points for themselves. And that's really the genesis of why we pushed the ePMR technology further. We don't think it's going to decelerate HAMR adoption because customers understand, to get to the beyond-60-terabytes, to the 80 to the 100s, they really need to adopt HAMR. But they want to be sure of the quality and the reliability of this new technology, new recording technology that hasn't been in the data centers for two, three, five years, so they get comfortable with it.

So they appreciate us creating that road map for them. And since it's manufactured on the same lines, we're not — we've created — it's fungible capacity from that perspective. So we feel that it's the right approach for the customers; that's certainly the feedback we've heard from all the customers is, they appreciate the thoughtful approach that we've taken to the transition. They will transition in their own time. There's a deadline, but there is a transition.

Irving Tan: I guess in terms of the performance features, Wamsi, that you're referring to, obviously we anticipate the take-up rate within the existing fleet of drives that we have shipping to customers, on the high bandwidth drives — Ahmed, would I say, 20, 15%?

Ahmed Shihab: About 20%.

Irving Tan: Okay, 20% of customers would want that in their fleets, right? And then obviously the energy efficient drives, that actually opens up a new TAM for us because that actually is an unfilled need between the hard drives and the archival storage tiers. Obviously all these new capabilities will be reflected in pricing that's above and beyond what we deliver for pure capacity today.

Ambrish Srivastava: Great. We'll go with Steve Fox over there? And then [points].

Steven Fox: Hi, thanks for all the great information; really an eye opener for someone who's followed this industry for many years. Um, one question; it seems like maybe it's an older question, but thinking about your areal density curve, it looks like it's going to be a lot faster over the next three years than you're talking about for bit growth, and you just mentioned new TAMs, etc. So, can you sort of talk — and I recognize you're not going to be 100% at 10 terabytes per platter in three years, but can you sort of talk about how you manage that sort of additional supply through this areal density and where else it could go?

Ahmed Shihab: So increasing the areal density, the acceleration of the areal density that we're seeing, it's really the focus of our engineers on the media recipes, how we design the media recipes and how we increase the — change the head design. So we're taking further advantage of technology we've had in our drives for some time; we're just being a lot more bullish about what they can do and we that's how we get the higher densities that we're looking for right now.

Steven Fox: But I guess I'm wondering, it compares to like a 25% bit growth CAGR and you're increasing areal density by two and a half [times] over like three years, so how does how do we equate those two numbers together?

Kris Sennesael: So, we will continue to innovate as fast as we can, and Ahmed has lined out the timing of that. Of course, on top of that, you have to lay an adoption curve at the customers, and the combination of all of that, for us, we believe we will be able to supply in line with the nearline growth of mid20s that we expect over the next three to five years.

Ambrish Srivastava: Great. We're going to go to Tom O'Malley?

Tom O'Malley: Tom O'Malley, Barclays. Thank you guys for doing this; appreciate it. Not not much to pick at here, just two questions on the technology side. You spent a little time talking about the bottleneck of SATA for flash. Can you talk about industry improvements in memory bandwidth and if you see that getting better over the next couple of years, and if that may help flash providers? And then second, you talked about a common API for flash and hard disk drives. A big gating factor for more flash use in the past has been the difficulty with moving the software over. As you guys integrate that, is that going to hurt you in customers being more readily able to move back and forth between flash and HDDs? Thank you.

Ahmed Shihab: Improvements in — so improvements in memory interfaces is just going to accelerate the pace with which data moves around. So that's just going to require more and more data to be transferred in and out of storage. So that's why we feel our bandwidth drives help us really meet some of that demand. So we see that trend is going in parallel with each other, and I think that's an important thing for us to have delivered to our customers.

On your second question, which I kind of — will the API hurt us versus help us? We feel that in those customers that have already started on flash, we want to meet them where they are. So we don't want to make an abrupt transition for them; we want to make a smooth transition for them as well. So by offering the same API and making the transition on the same media, they get the same performance capabilities, and then when they're ready they can take advantage of the hard drive economics without disrupting their business. And I think that's an important transition.

I don't think it'll hurt us going the other way, because starting with hard drives, you're going to like the economics, you're going to like the performance. There will be a small amount of workloads that may benefit from flash, but being customer-centric, it's the right thing to do for the customer.

Irving Tan: Yeah, if I may add, I think it's ultimately down to the workloads and specifically what we're looking at in the platforms with those open APIs is to really focus on the neoclouds where they're starting from a flash-first perspective to really open up the HDD TAM that we don't really actively participate today. As they start to grow and amount of their storage requirements increase, the economics will require them to move into that direction.

Ambrish Srivastava: We'll go, right next to Tom, right there. [points] Thank you.

Ananda Baruah: Hey, yeah, thanks guys. Ananda Baruah, Loop Capital. With the roadmap for areal density that you provided, which is super impressive — is there a useful way to think about mitigation of the supply-demand gap that's in place today? Is there a time frame that you think supply-demand can start to normalize? It sounds like regardless you guys have your paradigm on economics and value-add, that you have, so sounds like that won't change based on supply-demand equilibrium, but any context there given that your areal density roadmap seems like it's going to move pretty quickly over the next couple years? Thanks.

Irving Tan: Yeah, I mean — as we know that the supply environment is very strong, and the demand side of the house is trying to catch up. Obviously from a roadmap standpoint and from a production standpoint there's limited opportunity in what we can do for calendar year 26, but as we get — as you see the road map, as we're able to ramp up, as customers — again, as Kris mentioned, depending on the adoption cycle as we move to the latter part of '27, '28, we anticipate that gap to narrow. But again, you know, something that we've seen is that the demand for storage continues to grow at a rapid rate, so — even the mid-20s, who knows what it's going to be going forward.

Ambrish Srivastava: Can we come to the front here please?

Yang Pu: This is Yang Pu for Karl Ackerman at BNP Paribas. Thank you for this great presentation. I have two questions, first to Ahmed about the high bandwidth drives. The idea of dual-actuator drives has existed for years, but never really took off; why is that? And why do you believe they can be successful today? And I have a follow-up.

Ahmed Shihab: Okay. I think as I said earlier, these ideas have been around for a while, but typically the way they were implemented required customers to change the interfaces, the software, the hardware, and they typically cost more money and more power. That's been the history of trying to introduce these technologies. What we've done in our designs is really paid attention to keeping the customer experience the same. So we took all the complexity away from the customer and kept it inside the drive. That's a testament to our engineering capabilities and the way that we're able to work through the drive in the small form factor we have, but keep the customer experience the same. That's what's different about these. I've seen many of these ideas, as a customer, come to me over the years, and typically it suffered from poor experience, poor power, or it's more expensive, and in this case we solved for those problems very quickly based on the history of technologies we've been incubating for quite some time.

Irving Tan: Yeah, I hope you see the big change in in our focus as a company. We talked about, a year ago, being really focused on our customer in everything. You've probably heard the word customer close to 100 times over the last two hours and everything we are doing starts with the customer at the center. Having Ahmed and more and more of our talent that comes from the hyperscale environment really gives us good insight into what we need to be doing from our customers. It's not a technology-first view. It's a customer-first view that technology enables the outcome that they want.

Ambrish Srivastava: You go to —

Yang Pu: Sorry, I have a followup. It's just a overarching question, just a long-term look at where we are in the cycle right now. Demand is through the roof, and supply is constrained; the industry is very consolidated. I feel like it's hard to apply any of our previous experience of the historical cycles onto this one. How do you think this cycle would unwind? What would make you — anything make you worry about, like, in three to five years, anything would change? Or do you all sleep very well in night? I know no one has a crystal ball but any of your longtime perspective would be very helpful.

Irving Tan: Well, we let you guys predict the cycle, right? We don't do that; you guys are experts at it. I think our focus is on staying close to our customers. The fact that three of our top five customers have entered into long-term agreements with us that extend one and two, all the way up to calendar '28, through to '27. As Kris mentioned, we're having active discussions with the rest for '28, '29, and some of them for even '30. That visibility gives us the confidence of where things need to go and the fact that you know we're not driving this business with high CapEx unit capacity focus, we can toggle technology if we need to to meet exabyte supply and demand balance.

Ambrish Srivastava: [points]

Mehdi Hosseini: Thank you. Mehdi Hosseini, Susquehanna. Two follow-ups; one for Ahmed. Should I assume that most of the drives installed today, and over the next couple of years, are going to be on a SAS bus interconnect infrastructure?

Ahmed Shihab: No, most of the drives that exist today are on SATA interfaces. So all the hyperscalers use SATA interfaces. They're sufficient for their capabilities, and they have done for the last 10 years.

Mehdi Hosseini: Sure. Is that going to be sufficient, especially as for inferencing, and assuming that inferencing; some is done in the cloud and some on the edge. How is how would that change the SAS or SATA requirement?

Ahmed Shihab: We don't see the — customers have been really good at building the software layer, the object store layers and the file system layers such that they can aggregate the performance for many thousands of drives into serving those workloads. But as those workloads get hotter, they're looking for that more performance from us so that they can serve even more capacity and more performance to their end users. So the interfaces and the design of the boxes will evolve to meet the performance needs that we have in the future.

Mehdi Hosseini: Sure. Okay. And just one quick free cash flow question. Should I assume that the capital intensity will remain in the same range?

Kris Sennesael: Yeah, absolutely. So the CapEx intensity is four to six percent to revenue, and all the innovation that — Ahmed has talked about it, right? Especially because it's even recording technology agnostic, right? Will not require a step-up, will NOT require a step-up in CapEx.

Mehdi Hosseini: Thank you. Oh by the way I guess if we were all trying to figure out the downside is we have to figure out when is the next flood hitting Malaysia. God forbid. [chuckles]

Ambrish Srivastava: So, you used up four or five questions for the next several earnings calls. [group laughing] As did Amit! But we're going to go over there to Matt.

Matthew Scheffler: Hi, Matthew Scheffler, Investment Strategies Fund. You know, the amount of innovation sort of belies this question, but how do we know we're spending enough on R&D?

Ahmed Shihab: [chuckling] I think the results show that we are being very frugal about how we get ideas to market. We test the ideas the way that makes sense to us. We incubate them. We test them and only develop the ideas that are really resonating for our customers' experience; take them forward. So there's a lot more ideas than what we are looking at behind the scenes, it's just we do it in a very responsible and very frugal way.

Irving Tan: Yeah. Maybe I'll just add on to that, and Kris wants to as well. Look, we have definitely not stifled R&D at all. And even a year ago at the investor day, we said very clearly: we would return 100% of excess free cash flow to our shareholders. That's after the investments that we make into R&D. So again, we we're building a business not only for delivering our core drive business for today, we're also making investments into incubations for the future. These new growth vectors are something we are and will continue to make investments in, going forward — both R&D investments, and also financial investments into whether it's startups or M&A that we think is necessary, because our innovation framework has three pillars to it. We build internally, we partner, right? We co-innovate with our partners. And we also have a buy model of it. So that will not change going forward. Kris?

Kris Sennesael: Yeah, and so again, we're not starving the company. We are focused on accelerating the pace of innovation. I will allow him to spend more R&D dollars provided he does it in the most effective, most efficient way, and there is a strong return on investment. I'll stop it there. [group laughs]

Ambrish Srivastava: We have time for one more question; we're going to go to CJ over there. [points]

CJ Muse: Thank you. CJ Muse with Cantor Fitzgerald. Two questions: the first one I want to push you a little bit on gross margins. You're just a couple quarters away, I think, from 50% if you keep pricing stable and you maintain that 10% cost down. So, curious: is there something that's occurring going forward in the transitions that's reducing either your cost down, or yields not going to impact things as well? We'd love to learn a little bit more on that. And then second question would be probably a question you haven't received in, ever, which would be cannibalization going the other way. With NAND pricing moving the way it is, are you talking with customers and starting to see demand perhaps pick up that had traded away over to SSDs? Thanks so much.

Kris Sennesael: Yeah. So I'll take the gross margin question. So you think about it the right way. We are making good progress at improving gross margins. We are getting closer to the 50 and 50-plus gross margins. Obviously, we have a technology transition in front of us, but we've always stated, and I'll be happy to repeat it today, that if and when we transition to HAMR, this will be neutral to accretive to the gross margins.

Irving Tan: Yeah. And CJ to your question, look — I think what you see from the innovation that we shared today, from a capability standpoint, from a performance standpoint, we are reinventing the hard drive to make it much more competitive, much more suited for the AI workloads for today. At a minimum it's definitely going to preserve that 80% of bytes that's stored in hard drives. Do we think there's opportunity for us to expand on that given pricing? Again, it's a highly volatile environment and we'll see. But at a minimum I think it really gives us that confidence that we will continue to maintain that 80% share with some upside opportunity to grow it over time.

Ambrish Srivastava: Great. Thank you. So we come to the conclusion of our session.

Maker Will Whang has designed and open sourced an MK4001MTD USB Bridge. This is a USB mass storage compatible device which facilitates the use of the world’s smallest mechanical hard drives (obsolete for many years) with modern tech.

Toshiba launched its 0.85-inch MK4001MTD hard drives in 2004, offering an attractive-at-the -time balance of capacity and pricing. However, as they were sidelined quite rapidly due to the advance of flash memory tech, not many device designs adopted them. This has led to these tiny HDDs, and the data upon them, basically getting lost in time.

Whang explains that several prior attempts had been made at accessing the obsolete MK4001MTD drives, but they had fallen at various hurdles. So, the maker decided to start collecting working (and non-working) units to see if they could crack this particular old storage nut.

Starting with the basics, Whang compared drives and reader interface pads that looked similar to the MK4001MTD. Yes, it looks somewhat like an SD card with an MMC-style connector. So, various old/spare readers were used with the Toshiba drives to see what happened. Eventually, Whang decided to build their own reader based around the USB2240 flash media controller chip. It thus became possible to use a logic analyzer to see what signals were going where.

Unfortunately, it became clear that “this was not behaving like a normal SD or MMC storage device.” So, more analysis would be necessary, which would extend all the way into a reverse engineering effort.

For this next stage of the project, Whang acquired a beaten-up but usable Nokia N91. This mobile device was one of the rare MK4001MTD adopters back in the mid-noughties.

After getting the old phone to boot, so they could capture the traces, the purpose of each pad became much clearer. “The traces confirms this is a 4-bit SD/MMC interface and N91 service manual pin connection is indeed correct. The bus activity showed CMD52 traffic, which immediately pointed toward SDIO rather than a normal memory-card mode,” says Whang. “Looking further into the command contents, it also appeared that ATA-style commands such as IDENTIFY DEVICE were being transported over that interface.”

With the rough idea about what was going on, the maker decided to leverage OpenClaw to look after the software side of a USB reader solution. The AI agent was broadly successful, notes Whang, as it “successfully reverse-engineered the logic traces by building its own SDIO decoder, then wrote firmware for the Pico that exposes the drive as USB mass storage.”

Encouraged by the OpenClaw success, Whang decided to turn to Oups 4.6 and later GPT-5.4 for an improved result, which worked with their breadboarded Pico and a hand-wired drive.

Hardware design stage

Now happy with the software, firmware, and interface design, Whang decided to fire up KiCad and design a custom PCB for a neat, professional-looking solution. It shares the design language of the maker’s prior 1-inch MicroDrive project.

The result is that USB access to the MK4001MTD works reliably but is a pedestrian 0.42 MB per second read/write speed, at best, with the SDIO clock set to 10 MHz. This Toshiba drive was a measly 4GB (less than a DVD capacity), but at such a slow transfer speed, it would take about two and a half hours to read a full HDD or write it to full.

Whang concludes that they are happy with the collaborative work with a reasoning-focused LLM, and future projects might follow a similar structure. All the source code, hardware design files, and more have been shared on GitHub under the most liberal “I don’t care” license.

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"

A Reddit user on the r/DataHoarder subreddit shared how they were able to save money on hard drives by flying to the U.S. instead of purchasing them directly in the U.K. According to u/cgtechuk, they’ve been monitoring the prices of 28TB drives in the U.K., and only saw them go up. Because of this, they decided to take a trip after New Year's to buy ten of these high-capacity drives in the U.S. instead. Since Best Buy and B&H Photo both set a maximum purchase limit of just five drives each, the Redditor decided to get the drives from both shops. When the order was confirmed, they then booked a flight and a hotel in New York.

Decided to fly to the US to buy some hard drives from r/DataHoarder

We checked Amazon to see the cost of the Seagate IronWolf Pro 28TB HDDs in the U.K. and the U.S., and what we found was quite jaw-dropping. In the U.S., this hard drive "only" costs $609.99 a piece — and you could even get a discount on them if you’re able to find a good hard drive deal. On the other hand, Amazon UK lists the same drive and capacity at $980.46.

That’s a price difference of more than $370 per drive, and if you’re getting ten of these, then you’re looking at a savings of at least $3,700. On the other hand, the cheapest round-trip tickets between London Heathrow and JFK International start at less than $700. Even if you factor in the cost of a cheap hotel near JFK, which goes for around the same price for four nights, plus an extra $300 for pocket money, you’re still looking at savings of around $2,000. u/cgtechuk would have saved even more than that, though, as they said that they redeemed points for both the flight and the hotel stay.

To avoid getting scammed, they recorded everything when they picked up the drives they bought from Best Buy and B&H, including the serial numbers. They then tested each and every drive in their hotel with SeaTools, Crystal, and even copied files onto them to ensure that they didn’t get scammed with swapped-out drives. With everything verified, they then packed all ten drives (with their foam inserts) in their carry-on while putting their packaging in their checked luggage in case they need it for warranty.

Even though the AI build-out has mostly affected memory and storage chips, hard drives are also slowly but surely following the trend of limited availability and increased prices. In fact, their prices have surged by 46% since the third quarter of last year, and Western Digital has reported that its production capacity for 2026 is already sold out. This is because even though hard drives are much slower than SSDs, they’re still crucial for AI hyperscalers for nearline storage. With the latter surging in cost (up to 16x more expensive than HDDs), data centers are switching to more cost-efficient HDDs to store massive amounts of warm or cold datasets. This, in turn, drives up demand, resulting in higher prices for everyone, including consumers.

Western Digital Chief Executive Officer Irving Tan said that the company has already sold out of hard drives for 2026. Tan confirmed this during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, where, according to the transcript shared by Investing.com, he also confirmed that there are already some long-term agreements (LTAs) in place for the next couple of years.

“As we highlighted, we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers,” the executive said. “And we’ve also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028. Obviously, these LTAs have a combination of volume of exabytes and price.” This announcement is on track with the report from late last year that hard drives are on backorder for two years due to massive data center demand.

The company’s VP for Investor Relations, Ambrish Srivastava, said that 89% of its revenue came from its Cloud business, while its consumer business only delivered 5%. Because of this, it would make sense for the company to focus more on enterprise clients — similar to how memory chip makers decided to focus production on the more lucrative HBMs that are in demand from hyperscalers. The cost efficiency of hard drives has especially become more apparent now that SSDs are skyrocketing to more than 16x the price of an equivalent HDD.

However, this is going to be bad news for enthusiasts and consumers. Although many people prefer SSDs for most electronics, there is still a market for consumer hard drives, especially for use in NAS systems and long-term data storage. But the massive demand brought by the AI infrastructure buildout is causing shortages even for this component. Many HDD models have surged in pricing already, with costs jumping by an average of 46% since September 2025.

PC hardware shortages are only getting worse as the AI race continues. What started as a memory and storage chip shortage has soon spread into GPUs and is now hitting hard drives. Most consumers won’t feel the HDD pinch as it’s mostly a niche product in recent years, but we’re afraid that other parts, components, and product categories are going to follow suit with the price increases and supply shortages in the coming months.

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.

Western Digital this week outlined its near-term and mid-term plans to increase hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era. In addition, the company outlined its longer-term vision for hard disk drives' evolution that includes a new laser technology for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), new platters with higher areal density, and HDD assemblies with up to 14 platters. As a result, WD will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.

Western Digital plans to volume produce its inaugural commercial hard drives featuring HAMR technology next year, with capacities rising from 40TB (CMR) or 44TB (SMR) in late 2026, with production ramping in 2027. These drives will use the company's proven 11-platter platform with high-density media as well as HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy (FePt) on top of platters to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity before writing data.

New lasers

These edge-emitting lasers are efficient enough to make HAMR possible, but are mechanically and optically constrained, according to Ahmed Shihab, chief product officer at Western Digital. These lasers waste part of the generated light and are physically tall. That height forces additional spacing between platters, while optical losses limit how much thermal energy can be delivered to the media — both factors directly restrict areal density scaling.

More importantly, edge-emitting HAMR lasers are made with low yields as they rely on mechanical cleaving, precision optical alignment, and thermal screening, which prevents wafer-level testing. As a consequence, they can only be tested as part of the final head assembly, which greatly reduces yield (something that killed RDRAM years ago, as these memory chips must be tested only as part of the module assembly).

"Everybody in the industry, us included, use what is called an edge-emitting laser," Shibab said. "It is the gray box that you see sitting on the top [see the image above]. They work really well. They are the ones powering HAMR today, but they have three challenges. The light produced sometimes is wasted, so they waste a bit of energy that could be better used elsewhere. They’re quite tall, so we have to make sure the platters are some distance apart from each other. And during the hard drive manufacturing process, the yields are not as good as we’d like them to be."

To remove these limitations, Western Digital spent six years developing a patented vertical-emitting laser. Unlike conventional designs, it emits light straight down onto the magnetic media, couples more energy onto the disk, and is significantly shorter in the Z-dimension. This change enables two parallel advances: higher areal density (up from today's four terabytes per platter all the way to 10 TBs per platter) as well as a thinner head assembly that allows more disks to be packed into the same 3.5-inch drive. Furthermore, Western Digital's new vertical laser is made using a lithography process and can be tested on a wafer independently of the head, so the company also expects meaningfully higher manufacturing yields.

"By emitting more light, harnessing more of that light into the recording technology, we will increase the aerial density of the HAMR platters from four terabytes all the way to 10 terabytes by 2028 per platter," said Shihab. "This technology is not theoretical. It is actually already in the labs. We have watched it during the recording."

14 platters

Alongside its new vertical laser technology, Western Digital is also working on an HDD platform capable of housing up to 14 platters, another part of the equation enabling the company to increase the capacity of its hard drives significantly over the next 10 years or so.

The 12-platter platform will first be used with 60TB ePMR drives in 2028. While Western Digital does not disclose how many platters the company's 60TB HAMR HDD will use, it says that its ePMR and HAMR drives will use the same platform, which suggests that HAMR products will also use generally the same design.

 "We also borrowing some of the ideas from Hammer," said the CPO of Western Digital. "So, to get to 60, we will go to 12 platters. We are packing more capacity inside the same three and a half inch, all without changing the power profile of the drive. The customers don't have to spend more energy doing what we do."

Which is perhaps why Shihab carefully frames the new vertical laser technology not as a one-time capacity boost, but as a structural reset of HAMR's scaling curve that will aggressively grow starting in 2028 and is expected to enable 100TB HDDs in 2029 ~ 2030. In fact, once the vertical laser technology reaches its apex with granular media, sometime in the 2030s, Western Digital will be able to offer drives with an up to 140 TB capacity.

"10 terabytes, 14 platters, that sounds like 140 terabytes," Shihab teased.

Interestingly, but Western Digital's dual-actuator Dual Pivot HDDs that promise to double both bandwidth and sequential I/O IOPS performance also enter the scene at a 60TB capacity, though the company is tight-lipped whether these hard drives use ePMR or HAMR recording technology.

 "Dual Pivot technology helps customers focus their software effort on improving more performance for AI versus having to deal with how the hard drives work," Western Digital's chief product officer said. "We will introduce this at the 60 TB mark. […] So we are starting to put High Bandwidth drive technology in our customers hands today [and] my biggest problem is finding them enough material so they can start testing. Dual Pivot technology will be in their hands in late 2027 and in 2028.

Beyond 140 TB per drive

After that 140 TB milestone (which is pretty contingent), the company will have to move on to ordered granular (OG) and eventually bit patterned media (BPM), which is when HDD disks will be patterned using highly sophisticated etching, nanoimprint lithography, e-beam lithography, or even photolithography.

With BPM, hard drive technology will be dealing with very localized heating, which must be controlled with extreme accuracy. Excess energy can disturb neighboring bits, while insufficient energy prevents reliable writes, which is why somewhere along the line, HDD makers will have to invent next-generation laser designs that will combine heating performance with extreme precision.

At Western Digital's Innovation Day 2026 event, the company announced a new intelligent storage platform layer with open APIs that is designed to help customers operating 200+ PB fleets to both manage those devices and seamlessly add new ones.

The software layer is set to launch in 2027 and is intended to simplify integration of different classes of storage devices (including UltraSMR hard drives by non-hyperscalers), reduce qualification risk, and accelerate deployment of new devices. As an added bonus (to WD, at least), that platform layer will lock in customers with its hardware.

Now that solid-state drives command the lion’s share of client storage devices, data center-grade storage represents the majority of Western Digital’s business and the company has to adjust its offerings accordingly. While large hyperscalers develop their own hardware stacks, smaller players lack appropriate resources, making it increasingly hard for them to manage their expanding fleets of storage servers.

As a consequence, while these cloud and enterprise organizations increasingly operate storage pools totaling hundreds of petabytes, they still rely on manual integration, long qualification cycles, and fragmented storage tiers. To help its partners, Western Digital's new intelligent storage platform software abstracts complexity of large-scale storage environments and exposes them as programmable infrastructure. The goal is not to replace existing architectures, but to overlay them with automation and management capabilities that simplifies integration and accelerates time-to-production.

This new platform is designed to support the entire Western Digital portfolio, including SSDs, high-performance/high-capacity ePMR and HAMR-based HDDs, and ultra-high capacity SMR and UltraSMR hard drives. Using a common software framework will make it easier for cloud and enterprise customers to adopt new technologies that were otherwise hard or risky for them to use, including the latest and upcoming HDD platforms.

For obvious reasons, such a software layer locks customers with Western Digital and makes it far less appealing for them to adopt drives from rivals Seagate or Toshiba.

"WD's Innovation Day revealed a company that has genuinely transformed its strategy around customer infrastructure needs," said Ed Burns, HDD Research Director at IDC. "The market validation is already evident – customers are deploying these solutions because WD is solving what matters most for AI infrastructure: reliable capacity at scale, performance that meets demanding workloads, and economics that enable profitability. This customer-centric approach, combined with operational discipline positions WD well in the market going forward."

Although NAND memory has replaced traditional hard disk drives in the vast majority of client PCs, HDDs can still offer capacities at costs not achievable by solid-state drives today, particularly in the data center space. In a bid to retain the relevance of hard drives for years to come, Western Digital on Tuesday announced two distinct families of HDDs: one aimed at applications that require maximum performance and decent IOPS-per-TB, another designed for power-optimized applications that value limited power consumption and predictable performance.

High-Bandwidth HDD

The whole concept of Western Digital's High-Bandwidth HDD stems from reading data from the media using more than one head and transferring it to one or two hosts. The company showcases two types of High-Bandwidth HDDs at its Innovation Day: one uses more than one head for reading and writing at the same time to achieve 2X bandwidth compared to conventional HDDs, and another one features a second fully independent actuator to achieve 2X bandwidth and 2X sequential I/O performance. Over time, High-Bandwidth HDDs are projected to scale up bandwidth by eight times and I/O by four times when both approaches are combined within a single HDD.

WD's original dual-actuator High-Bandwidth HDD architecture — which is already being validated by the company's clients — allows multiple heads on multiple tracks to read and write simultaneously, thus exploiting internal parallelism to deliver 2X bandwidth of traditional 3.5-inch HDDs.

The next step for Western Digital is its Dual-Pivot High-Bandwidth HDD architecture is to add a second, fully independent actuator on a separate pivot inside the same 3.5-inch drive. Each actuator controls its own set of heads and enables two independent read/write operations at once, thus delivering up to 2X sequential I/O performance without reducing capacity. Dual-Pivot HDDs are currently in the lab and are targeted to become available in 2028. Over time, the two architectures will be combined to deliver 4X higher I/O performance compared to traditional hard drives.

Power-Optimized HDDs

In addition to offering High-Bandwidth drives for performance-demanding applications, Western Digital is also working on Power-Optimized HDDs that reduce power consumption by 20% for 'active cold' storage tier.

Western Digital positions Power-Optimized HDDs for 'active cold' storage tier for AI workloads that generate massive volumes of data — such as datasets, checkpoints, and logs — which must remain quickly accessible (which rules out tape), but cannot be stored on traditional high-capacity HDDs or SSDs due to cost concerns.

The company says that these power-optimized 3.5-inch HDDs use a 'minimal random IO' for 20% less power than conventional drives, which reduces ownership costs and makes 'active cold' storage cheaper to run. WD expects the first power-optimized HDDs to enter customer qualification in 2027.

Competing with QLC-based SSDs

Although High-Bandwidth and Power Optimized HDDs serve completely different purposes, they are paradoxically designed to rival the wide product category — data center-grade 3D QLC NAND-based SSDs. Such drives can offer storage density and performance that cannot be achieved by modern HDDs. However, by tailoring features and performance of hard disk drives for particular applications, Western Digital believes it can offer better value than QLC NAND-based SSDs.

Western Digital on Tuesday announced plans to extend its energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology to 60TB, thus producing ePMR-based hard drives along with its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for several years down the road to guarantee steady availability of high-capacity drives. The company intends to release its 40TB UltraSMR hard drive in the second half of this year, with its HAMR-based counterpart following in 2027. By 2029, Western Digital plans to offer 100TB HAMR-based HDDs.

Western Digital made several important announcements about its short-term, mid-term, and long-term hard disk drive roadmap at its Innovation Day 2026 event on Thursday. The key part of the announcement is that the company will extend usage of its ePMR technology to 60TB hard drives, which means that high-capacity ePMR HDDs will coexist with HAMR drives over the next several years. HAMR HDDs (of unknown capacity) remain on track for mass production in 2027 after getting qualified by Western Digital's hyperscale customers.

The flagship HDD from Western Digital this year will be its 40TB HDD based on the ePMR technology and using shingled track layout (SMR) with UltraSMR enhancements, which is currently being qualified by two hyperscale customers. Previously, the company planned to offer a 36TB HDD based on the ePMR 2 technology with conventional magnetic recording (CMR), a 40TB SMR drive, and a 44TB UltraSMR HDD.

This 40TB hard drive will not be the last ePMR-based product from the company, as Western Digital intends to keep using the technology for at least a couple of years before HAMR-powered solutions will take over when HDD capacities hit 60TB. Yet, these next-generation ePMR drives will be 'leveraging HAMR innovations without increasing power consumption.' While Western Digital yet has to disclose what it means, we assume that the company intends to use a unified platform for ePMR and HAMR drives with next-generation media that uses iron platinum (FePt), which allows to achieve much higher areal densities — think 2.5 Tb/inch² – 3.5 Tb/inch² — than is possible today.

"The result is unprecedented flexibility," a statement by Western Digital reads. "Hyperscalers and enterprises can adopt either technology on their own timelines with predictable capacity planning and seamless scaling – no forced technology transitions, no infrastructure disruptions, just continuous and accelerating capacity growth built on architecture they already trust."

For now, Western Digital does not disclose the capacity of its first HAMR drives, but it is safe to say that they will succeed its 40TB UltraSMR hard drive in 2027. Also, it looks like the company plans to advance its HAMR-based offerings at a high pace with plans to offer 100TB HAMD hard drives by 2029, essentially moving from 40TB in 2026 to 100TB in less than three years.

Extensive research into the pricing of some of the best hard drives on the market for large capacity, economical storage indicates that prices are beginning to increase sharply, with some of the most popular models on the market seeing increases upwards of 60%. According to research from ComputerBase, pricing analysis on 12 of the most popular mainstream drives on the market indicates an average price increase of 46% over the last 4 months.

While the research and price checks on these drives track movement based on European prices (ComputerBase is a German outlet), Tom's Hardware checks on similar or identical SKUs in the U.S. indicate that the trends are indeed replicated, or perhaps worse, on the other side of the pond.

CB reports that various drives like Seagate's IronWolf NAS line, Toshiba's Cloud Scale Capacity Drives, Western Digital's WD Red, and Seagate's BarraCuda lines are all showing price increases of between 23% and 66%. As noted, the average price increases clock in at 46% since September 2025.

The trend is also visible in the U.S. A Seagate IronWolf drive with just 4TB capacity would have set you back $70 in early 2023; that drive is now $99. Similarly, the 8TB model is $199, when it would have been priced as low as $130 a couple of years ago. Western Digital's Red Plus alternative is now $175 for 8TB. The toughest blow of all? Seagate's iconic BarraCuda 24TB drive, which we've seen cost as little as $239 during sales events, now costs a whopping $499 on Amazon, and you'll be buying it from a third party. Newegg doesn't even have it in stock.

Optical hard drives mark yet another casualty claimed by an explosion in AI buildouts in recent months that is consuming global DRAM capacity, squeezing RAM and SSD prices. The increases in RAM and SSD prices have become elevator noise at this point, with 100% or more price increases stifling enthusiasts and forcing a return to DDR4 PC building for some. While HDDs are obviously more insulated against DRAM and HBM supply issues, they play a crucial role in storing bulk data used for training AI models. Production is also being pivoted towards higher-capacity enterprise drives for AI data centers, squeezing supply for consumers.

As such, while HDDs may not directly be impacted by DRAM shortages, prices are being pulled up by the industry. Indeed, very few core components of PC building remain unaffected by price rises, with RAM, SSDs, HDDs, and, of course, GPUs all vulnerable to ongoing AI pricing pressure.

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.

After nearly two years of relative calm, the hard disk drive (HDD) market is showing signs of stress again. According to a report from Digitimes Asia (quoting Nikkei), HDD contract prices jumped roughly 4% quarter over quarter in Q4 2025. That's the sharpest increase seen in eight quarters, and suppliers expect this upward pressure to persist. That might sound like a niche storage story, but in reality, it's a symptom of much larger forces reshaping the entire computing supply chain, from Chinese PC procurement policies to the rapid AI-driven expansion of U.S. data centers.

The report identifies two primary demand drivers. The first is a sudden resurgence of HDD demand in China's PC market, driven by government procurement policies that favor domestically produced CPUs and operating systems. That policy shift has accelerated local PC production, and in an unexpected twist, has also boosted HDD adoption. A big part of the reason is trust, or rather, the lack of it. Sources cited in the report point to concerns around long-term data retention in SSDs, whose critical components rely on NAND flash memory that is vulnerable to "bit rot" over time spent in storage. The result has been a renewed push toward HDDs for certain use cases, reversing what had long looked like an inexorable transition toward solid-state storage.

The second major pressure point is the U.S. data center sector, where demand for high-capacity nearline HDDs continues to grow. Despite years of predictions that flash storage would displace spinning disks entirely, hyperscale operators still rely heavily on HDDs for bulk storage, backups, and cold or warm data tiers. As AI workloads scale, so does the volume of data they generate, store, and move—much of which ends up on large, relatively cost-efficient hard drives.

TrendForce data cited in the report suggests that HDD manufacturers are already running at full utilization, yet still can't keep pace with demand from cloud service providers. Prices for nearline HDDs rose by a similar 4% quarter over quarter, underscoring that this isn't a localized PC phenomenon but a broader capacity problem.

What makes this moment especially interesting is how it intersects with the wider AI infrastructure boom. AI data centers aren't just consuming GPUs and accelerators; they're devouring memory, storage, power equipment, and even physical construction capacity at a historic pace. High-bandwidth memory and enterprise DRAM are already in short supply, and elevated DRAM pricing has made it harder for HDD makers to control manufacturing costs, even as demand surges. After all, hard drives use lots of DRAM for cache memory.

In that sense, HDD pricing pressure isn't an anomaly so much as it is collateral damage. Capital expenditure on AI infrastructure has ballooned so rapidly that it's begun showing up in macroeconomic data. Analysts have pointed out that a disproportionate share of recent U.S. GDP growth has come from investment spending tied to data centers, servers, and related infrastructure rather than consumer demand. HDDs, humble as they may seem, are part of that same CapEx wave.

Unlike flash memory, which can ramp with new fabs and process shrinks, HDD production is constrained by specialized components such as read/write heads and precision media. Scaling output isn't fast or cheap, and manufacturers have been cautious about expanding capacity after years of pricing pressure and consolidation. The result is a market that can tighten quickly when demand rebounds from multiple directions at once.

The bigger takeaway is that hard drives, often treated as a legacy technology, are once again being pulled into the center of the industry's growth story. Between China's shifting procurement priorities and the AI sector's insatiable appetite for data storage, spinning disks are experiencing demand dynamics few would have predicted just a couple of years ago. Whether this turns into a sustained pricing cycle or a temporary squeeze will depend on how quickly capacity expands, and whether AI infrastructure spending continues at its current breakneck pace.

If you're always running out of storage for your backups or media collection, you need a big deal on an even bigger hard drive. Luckily, there's a huge discount on a Seagate external HDD that will knock your socks off. A whopping 28TB of hard drive storage space is available, which leaves you with a huge amount of space for documents, photos, and videos.

It's all down to Amazon, which has dropped the price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 28TB HDD to £419.99, ready for you to pre-order before deliveries begin in a few days' time on 17th December. There simply aren't many other options available with this capacity, and the options that do exist involve individual drives that often cost you hundreds of pounds more, so you'll want to jump on this deal before it releases.

• Check out the deal at Amazon

For just under £15 per TB, you're getting a traditional 3.5" hard disk drive inside its own portable enclosure. The enclosure features its own power supply, which you'll need to hook up to a nearby socket, while using a USB 3.0 cable to connect this drive to your PC or laptop for file transfers. You're also getting Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery service included, just in case your drive fails and you need to try to recover your data.

You'd usually pick up an external hard drive like this one if you weren't too worried about extremely fast transfer rates. This isn't an SSD, after all. It's also a good alternative to a full-blown NAS, and isn't as expensive.

If you're looking for a drive you can install directly into your PC, that's not totally out of consideration, either. Some of these enclosures use enterprise-grade Exos drives, which you can remove from the enclosure itself. Shucking, as this is called, will almost certainly void your warranty, but it can be a great way to pick up a high-capacity HDD at a much lower cost. You'll also need to research what these drives actually contain if this is your aim, however, as it can be a bit of a minefield.

This 28TB Seagate Expansion HDD is encased in an enclosure made from a rugged black plastic, measuring 7 x 2 x 5 inches, and sits on small rubber feet on the bottom of the chassis. You'll find the power and USB connections at the back of the drive, but as I mentioned already, you can't power this over USB. This needs the external AC power adapter to run, so make sure to keep a spare socket nearby.

You'll also need to be close enough to your PC or laptop. You do have an approx. 45cm USB 3.0 cable, so there is a little bit of length to play with here, although you can purchase a new data cable later. Setting this drive up should be as simple as plugging it into your PC or laptop, as long as it has power.

Should you run into any issues with the drive, especially if you think it's failed, you can call on Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery service, which guarantees you a single in-lab attempt by professionals to recover the data. There's no guarantee this will work, but it's nice to have the option to try, just in case.

This £419.99 28TB Seagate Extension Desktop HDD is a very affordable price for a drive of this capacity, especially with the option to shuck it. If you want it, you can pre-order it before dispatches begin on the 17th December. There's no guarantee that it won't sell out before then, however, so be sure to get your orders in quickly.

If you're looking for further 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.

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).

If you're serious about your storage, then you're not going to be switching completely to SSDs (at least, not yet). Nothing quite beats the traditional hard drive when its come to sheer storage capacity, which is why a serious data hoarders is going to take a strong interest in this WD external hard drive deal, available with a huge £148 saving for Black Friday.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

This WD Elements 16TB external hard drive is down to just £258.99 on Amazon right now, and while the drive has yo-yo'd in price, according to Camelcamelcamel data, this is still a historically good discount, even if it isn't the lowest it's ever been. This great deal is also priced well against the wider market, with drives featuring similar capacity and specs priced higher, even with discounts.

The WD Elements 16TB is designed to be a portable place to store all of your treasured files, whether it's your photos, music, movies, or improved documents. 16TB of storage is significantly more storage than the common PC or laptop might typically hold, putting it closer to a NAS in terms of the sheer volume of space you'll have at your disposal.

Unlike a NAS, however, you're not hooking this up to your network with an Ethernet cable. This connects to your existing system easily with a standard USB 3.1 Gen 1 port, so compatibility shouldn't really be a concern, and a Windows PC should detect it with no fuss.

The good news, for those who like cracking open their equipment, is that the WD Elements 16TB features a shuckable drive. That means you can easily remove the physical drive, hidden inside the enclosure, and reuse it in your PC or NAS. This will void the two-year warranty that comes with the drive, however, so make sure you're happy with that before you proceed.

Measuring 5.31 x 1.89 x 6.53 inches and weighing 0.9 pounds, this isn't a physically heavy or large drive to handle, and can be moved around, even if it isn't as portable as an external SSD might be. It does require external power, however, and you'll need to keep a spare socket nearby to hook it up with juice, as it can't be powered over just USB.

If you're looking for a large repository for your files, this £258.99 WD Elements 16TB drive is ready for you to plug in and start loading. Mac users will need to format it with a file system that macOS can read, but that isn't too much bother, either.

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, or CPU Deals pages.

The race to achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence) has pushed constituents to invest in and build data centers at a pace far outstripping our ability to make them. Manufacturers are struggling to keep up with AI demand, and the ongoing DRAM shortage is proof of this, with memory kits costing more than double what they did just a few months ago. Now, DigiTimes is reporting that storage is taking a hit, too, with delivery times for enterprise-grade HDDs delayed by two years.

That means if a firm wants to buy large-capacity hard drives, the backbone of nearline storage, it has to wait 24 months due to long lead times. As the news cycle suggests, AI money doesn't wait for anyone, so hyperscalers are now switching to QLC NAND-based SSDs to avoid these backorders. Picking QLC over TLC allows them to maintain costs while achieving sufficient endurance for cold storage.

However, hoarding QLC NAND creates its own shortage, since every cloud provider in North America and China is now lining up to buy it. This could lead to SSD prices rising worldwide, as most value-oriented models use QLC to save costs. In fact, DigiTimes claims that production capacity for QLC is completely booked through 2026 at some NAND manufacturers.

Therefore, given the current situation, QLC NAND is expected to overtake TLC in popularity by early 2027, marking a significant shift in the storage landscape. While enterprise-grade QLC SSDs would entirely power this pivot, Sandisk has already raised NAND prices by 50%, according to another DigiTimes report, after initially warning of a 10% increase two months ago.

This unprecedented shortage across memory and storage was largely unforeseen. Still, given the AI ambitions of the world's wealthiest, the overnight whiplash is perhaps the only surprising aspect of these price hikes. Last month, the Adata chairman hinted that the situation would only worsen over time, and it's taken just a few weeks for us to receive confirmation.

Every DRAM and NAND manufacturer is now selling capacity to AI customers willing to pay the big bucks. Instead of having 2-3 months of buffer capacity, these firms are down to just a few weeks now. This has led to year-best numbers for many businesses — a sharp turnaround from a few years ago — but, as usual, the short end of the stick trickles down to regular consumers who're now entangled in yet another electronics scarcity.

Hard drive manufacturer Western Digital has confirmed that it is looking into potential problems with its older hard drives identified by data recovery scientists. The drives in question, a collection of 2TB to 6TB WD Blue and Red models released around 2020, are SMR drives, a classification that already brought WD a class-action lawsuit in 2021.

"Trust and reliability are the foundation of everything we do at Western Digital," reads WD's official response to German outlet Heise Online. "We take the results reported by 030 Datenrettung Berlin GmbH seriously and have initiated an investigation by our engineering teams to understand the scope and details of these reports."

As WD alludes to, multiple data recovery scientists, including 030 data recovery, have begun reporting the issues fundamental to WD's use of SMR technology in lower-capacity drives. An open secret since 2021, data scientists have known that these 2TB to 6TB WD Red and Blue SMR drives have increased chances of failure, up to permanent data loss and physical drive damage.

SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives have been an available technology for hard drive makers to increase capacity cheaply at the cost of performance for years. SMR drives "shingle" data written onto them, as the name suggests, by overlaying the write tracks of data on top of other data, like roof shingles.

While this results in up to 25% greater capacity per platter in smaller drive sizes, it also adds layers of complexity and failure, as rewriting write tracks shingled under neighboring data becomes a whole production. As a result, SMR in smaller consumer drives has anecdotally caused problems in ZFS, RAID, and other redundant file systems for years. For a longer lesson on SMR, see our explainer written here in our first article on WD's use of SMR in these very drives in 2020.

Now, data recovery scientists are confirming that Western Digital Blue and Red drives with the WD*0EZAZ, WD*0EDAZ, and WD*0EFAX model numbers at the 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB sizes are prone to abnormally high failure rates. Data scientists like 030 Datenrettung, mentioned above, also previously included WD Purple drives released at the same time in their list of failing SMR drives, but WD confirmed that the Purple drives are built on a different enough firmware that the same issues would not affect these drives. Larger SMR drives are also not at risk of the same failures.

The EZAZ, EDAZ, and EFAX drive models have been trouble for WD many times before. When the drives were released in 2020, WD did not disclose to consumers that the drives utilize SMR technology, a serious omission. While the company issued an apology for its blunder, a class-action lawsuit launched in 2021 secured a $2.7 million compensation fund for hoodwinked WD customers, paying out $4-$7 per claimant.

Now, these same problematic drives are also proving to be at risk of serious damage and data loss. Anyone using WD hard drives at these sizes from 2020 or later should check their hardware to ensure they are not also at risk of data loss and failure; data scientists suggest that the first sign of trouble with the drives will be loud noises coming from the spinning platters, though that warning sign is a fairly universal signal of something going terribly wrong.

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.

10/15/2025 update: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that rival drive makers currently top out at 10 platters. But Western Digital has been shipping 11-platter drives in 32TB (SMR) and 26TB (CMR) since 2024.

Toshiba has announced that it is the first company in the hard disk storage space to “verify 12-disk stacking technology.” Rivals currently aren’t able to squeeze more than 10 or 11 platters in their 3.5-inch HDDs. Thanks to this latest innovation, Toshiba expects to be able to commercialize 40TB HDDs for data centers as early as 2027.

Turn it up to 11? This one goes to 12.

How did Toshiba manage to add 20% more platters to the confines of a standard 3.5-inch form factor drive? The answer is, of course, through miniaturization. More specifically, the squishing of platters required “the development of new dedicated parts in the stack, and replacement of the current aluminum substrate medium with a glass substrate that offers greater durability and allows thinner designs.” Furthermore, Toshiba promises “improved mechanical stability and in-plane accuracy, higher density and greater reliability,” with its advanced design.

Safe from HAMR?

Toshiba is going to support the new 12-disk stacking technology devices with its Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) technology for the headlining 40TB HDDs, sometime in 2027. However, it is also investigating devices using next-generation Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. This could be important, as its MAMR roadmap has been relatively conservative compared to rivals already on the HAMR train.

Some competitors, like Seagate, have roadmaps with 100TB+ HAMR drives (from 2030). WD is also plowing forward with HAMR, but Seagate seems to have leveraged its Invetac acquisition to put it ahead.

In summary, the 12-platter stacking breakthrough is an important engineering milestone for Toshiba. It will help prevent it from trailing too far behind rivals. Beyond capacities, Toshiba’s work is claimed to deliver “greater durability,” and that could also resonate with data center storage buyers and their TCO and reliability-focused decision-making.

More details Friday

Toshiba will be showcasing its new 12-disk stacking technology at the IDEMA Symposium on October 17, 2025, in Kawasaki, Japan. We expect to get some more technical data about its innovation there.

Even though SSDs have largely eclipsed mechanical drives in today's PC landscape, they still hold an important position when it comes to mass storage — specifically for archival duties, such as a NAS. Usually, even hard drives can soar in cost when you scale the capacity; that's why scoring a deal can be really enticing in these one-and-done sort of purchases. We've spotted one such offer for you: Western Digital's 22TB WD Red Pro hard drive for just $400 on Amazon, a solid $50 less than its list price.

• Check out HDDs for your NAS on Amazon

The WD Red Pro, apart from its obviously gargantuan 22-terabyte capacity, is a very well-rounded hard drive. It's a standard 3.5-inch SATA-based offering driven by a 7200 RPM motor, rated for 550 TB/year workloads. It's optimized for RAID and features a multi-axis shock sensor that detects subtle shock events, allowing it to adjust operations on the fly to compensate for any sudden activity. We've tested the 20TB model of the WD Red Pro and provided a fair review a few years ago; this 22TB version is a slight upgrade — you can expect solid performance when it comes to sustained workloads.

Moreover, the Red Pro features Western Digital's OptiNAND technology, which is similar to DRAM on modern SSDs, a small amount of flash (512 MB in this case) reserved to speed up operations and add longevity. Pair that with a transfer rate of up to 265 MB/s, and this is a fast drive, especially for HDDs. It also uses CMR instead of SMR, offering predictable performance, which is particularly helpful for a NAS that undergoes frequent rewrites. WD backs all that up with a 5-year warranty for added peace of mind. It's a strong package that combines all the features with the right price to form the perfect NAS deal.

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.

HDDs aren’t dead yet, and thus today we can celebrate the aging spinning rust data storage medium’s 69^th birthday. On this day in 1956, IBM announced the RAMAC 350 Disk Storage Unit, packing an awe-inspiring 3.75MB of data across 50 magnetic platters, each spanning 24-inches in diameter and spinning at 1,200 RPM. This magnetic disk-based storage, which earned the nickname the ‘baloney slicer,’ was designed to partner with IBM’s RAMAC 305 mainframe vacuum-tube based computer system.

RAMAC is short for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. The IBM RAMAC 305 computer system paired with the 350 disk, for its high speed random access to information, and delivery of “exponentially faster” performance and efficiency vs prior storage technologies.

This innovation was revolutionary for businesses, who often used on systems reliant on punch cards, for example. RAMAC 350 would allow businesses to get rid of their old tub files full of punch cards, and many human filing operatives. IBM’s historical blog post about the RAMAC notes the device became the “progenitor of all hard disk drives… paved the way for the invention of the relational database… and ultimately laid the groundwork for everything from spaceflight and ATMs to search engines and e-commerce.”

In some of the old images and videos showing off the RAMAC 350 you can see operators feeding it punch cards. The 3.75MB of storage this direct hard disk ancestor put on random-access tap was equivalent to approximately 62,500 punch cards – or about five million characters of text.

IBM refined the RAMAC 350 by working on the seek speeds of the multi-arm read/write heads across all its huge platters. Only after it achieved 800ms data seeking perfromance did the first of these disk storage units get rolled out to customers.

Though its digital data storage capacity seems tiny when compared to modern technologies, the RAMAC 350 was incredibly bulky. So indeed, when it was rolled out, it actually had to be rolled around like a piano.

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.

MORE: Best SSDs

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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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Newegg has Seagate's 24 TB BarraCuda on sale for only $249.99, shaving off $50 from its original price, meaning it has now dropped down to its insanely low Primed Day pricing.

Tech and food share something in common; just like you can never have enough cheese, you can never have enough storage. While SSDs are the norm these days, they still can't quite match the cost savings of a spinning drive, especially if you need a lot of capacity. As such, we bring you an insane deal today for a hard drive that's on sale for a limited time. Those are some decent savings on their own, but—when you do the math—it comes out to just a cent per gigabyte, which is where the offer becomes truly enticing.

• Check out the deal here on Newegg

Seagate’s BarraCuda series has long built a reputation for dependable performance, delivering consistent speeds of 7,200 RPM. It’s not here to outpace your SSD, but rather to offer sheer capacity at an attractive price. For those seeking “cheap and deep” storage, few options match this value—this drive reaches up to 190MB/s, which is more than respectable for a hard drive. In our review of its 8 TB variant, we saw it consume the least amount of power among all hard drives, which is another plus.

Inside, this drive uses high-quality Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) technology—far better than the slower Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) approach, which often feels like its namesake when it comes to transfer speeds. SMR only makes sense if you’re willing to sacrifice performance for a lower price, a compromise that rarely pays off. Thankfully, that’s not the case here as it features premium CMR tech, along with a two-year Seagate warranty for added peace of mind.

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

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.

Secure data storage manufacturer iStorage has announced new versions of its encrypted desktop hard drives, the diskAshur DT3 and diskAshur DT2. Both drives offer PIN authentication and hardware-level encryption. They will now be available with up to 26TB capacity, making them suitable for users looking for high-capacity storage with enhanced security measures.

The diskAshur DT3 is notably the world's first encrypted hard drive currently undergoing certification for FIPS 140-3 Level 3, an updated U.S. standard for cryptographic security. For context, FIPS 140-2 certified drives (like the diskAshur DT2) are currently the standard for securing sensitive data across sectors like government, defense, finance, and healthcare.

However, FIPS 140-2 is expected to be phased out by September 2026 in favor of FIPS 140-3. The new standard is said to offer improved security features such as tamper resistance, enhanced encryption, better key management, and protection against side-channel attacks, at the same time aligning with global regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.

The diskAshur DT3 is also TAA compliant and features FIPS PUB 197-validated AES-XTS 256-bit hardware encryption and a Common Criteria EAL5+ certified secure microprocessor. On the other hand, the diskAshur DT2 is also quite secure, featuring a Common Criteria EAL5+ certified microprocessor and accreditations from NCSC CPA, FIPS 140-2 Level 3, NLNCSA BSPA, and NATO Restricted.

Buffalo Japan has launched a special limited edition USB hard disk to commemorate 50 years since the firm's founding. The new Buffalo HD-SKL 'skeleton hard disk' (machine translated) features a transparent panel, which is nicely visible when using the external drive's angled stand. Through the panel, owners can see the platters spinning and the read/write heads skating across the magnetic surface.

As a commemorative product, the attractions of this hardware lean heavily on its looks, rather than its functionality. Buffalo boasts of the "premium quality" machined and anodized aluminum construction of its anniversary 4TB HDD. The packaging is quite lavish for this kind of product, too.

For a real piece of executive desk toy action, users can load up some software from Buffalo called SeekWizard (Windows only). This application allows users to animate the HDD arm visible through the window in the following modes (remember this information is based on a machine translation, but these modes seem to make some sense):

• Random seek,
• Sequential seek,
• Metronome,
• Cascading,
• Second hand stepping,
• Wave,
• and Timer.

Perhaps Buffalo missed a trick by not illuminating the 'skeleton hard disk' window with some kind of lighting effects. But it is not following the latest trend of making products with RGB backlit windows showing inner workings – like the new Asus ROG Flow Z13, and the latest Alienware PCs. In fact, this product is a follow-up to one Buffalo previously launched back in 1978 – its first Skeleton HDD model.

Though they aren't entirely relevant to the appeal of this limited edition product, let's look a bit closer at the specs. We already mentioned that this is a 4TB HDD at heart. The drive sits in a nicely made angled metal bracket and the whole caboodle weighs about 1.5kg. If you want to use it as more than an inanimate ornament, you will need to plug it into your Mac or PC via its USB 3.2 (Gen 1) Micro-B interface. A 1m cable is in the box, as is an AC adapter. Remember, this drive's special SeekWizard software only works with Windows, for now.

While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they’re made of – including several rare earth elements (REE) – end up as e-waste.

At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech industry’s access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for magnetic storage, motors, and generators.

Yesterday, Western Digital announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go back into the U.S. market.

Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program, WD’s initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material.

The drives came from Microsoft’s U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to extract the rare earth elements.

CMR’s ADR process uses a copper salt solution to create a selective leaching that produces 99.5 percent pure REO. The company avoids harsh chemicals that would damage the REO or adjacent materials such as aluminum.

The reclaimed rare earth elements can then be sold back into the U.S. supply system where they can be used to manufacture new tech products. According to WD’s whitepaper, the reclaiming process produces 95 percent fewer greenhouse gases than virgin mining of the same materials.

If done at a large scale, the reclaimed materials could take the place of some of the materials the U.S. sources from China. However, of the seven materials China is restricting – samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium – only dysprosium is commonly found in hard drives.

“HDDs are vital to our data center infrastructure, and advancing a circular supply chain is a core focus for Microsoft,” Chuck Graham, Microsoft CVP, Cloud Sourcing, Supply Chain, Sustainability, and Security said in a press release.

To get their recycling program up and running, WD and its partners went through 18 months of testing, with the initial study period beginning in 2023 and ending in December 2024 Now the company is working with more partners.

"Western Digital is currently expanding the HDD rare earth material capture program based on the successful pilot with Microsoft," Jackie Jung, WD's VP of Global Operations Strategy and Corporate Sustainability told Tom's Hardware. "This program is now in development with a number of our hyperscale customers."

The potential need for hard drive recycling is huge and growing. According to the Financial Times, there were 23,000 data centers with 70 million servers as of 2022. Each of these servers has multiple hard drives which reach their end of life, often after just three to five years. The amount of e-waste overall is expected to reach 75 million tons by 2030.

An enterprising individual has shared a quick step-by-step guide showing how to convert an old Hard Disk Drive (HDD) into a small but useful variable speed disc sander. The project also requires just a modicum of time, a few simple tools, and a handful of extra components.

If you have been a computing enthusiast for more than a few years, you might have a few unwanted or dead HDDs in your possession. You might also reckon that a disc sander is a useful tool to have, but do not feel that shelling out over $100 on a dedicated device, like this one on Amazon, is worth it. If these two planets align for you, then YouTuber ProShorts101's idea might be the perfect project.

The project starts with a WD Caviar Blue WD1600AAJS. This 2009 vintage HDD offered a meager 160GB of noisy spinning rust storage. We aren't sure if this particular WD1600AAJS was still functional as data storage, but would hope not, as that would upset the gods of retro. While the 7,200 rpm motor in this 3.5-inch device might be one of the better choices available for the intended task, here it is souped-up with a 30 Amp Electronic Speed Controller (ESC), among other components.

On the topic of components, according to ProShorts101, the following list of bits and pieces is required to transmogrify your HDD into a disc sander: an old HDD, a 30A Drone ESC, a servo tester, a 12V socket, and some sand paper.

HDD disc sander maker method

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.

Happy World Backup Day, everybody! Yes, today is the official reminder to think about how all your precious data is backed up. Often overlooked until it's too late, backing up your photos and videos, or even customer data, is essential. Once lost, it might be impossible to recover, and then it's gone for good, and the potential losses, financially and emotionally, are hard to think about.

Today's deal is on one of Seagate's IronWolf Pro HDDs (24TB capacity) for $399, available from B&H Photo. Some might think that mechanical hard disk drives are a relic of the past and are far too slow for modern needs. Well, yes, they are nowhere near as fast as the latest PCIe Gen5 SSDs, but what they lack in terms of speed, they make up for in price per capacity and longevity. These particular drives from Seagate are designed to be operated 24/7 all day, every day.

The IronWolf Pro is a 3.5-inch drive with a 7200 RPM spin speed and SATA connectivity. The SATA III interface has a 6 Gb/s transfer bandwidth, a read/write transfer speed of 285 MB/s and a workload rating of up to 550TB per year. If you're looking for some of the best drives to fill up your workhorse NAS setup then this IronWolf Pro deal should be on your radar.

Grab some peace of mind with your data storage. Rated for 2.5 million hours of MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), the Seagate IronWolf Pro also comes with a 5-year limited manufacturer's warranty.

Ahead of celebrating World Backup Day at the end of the month, we've spotted this great deal on a large external HDD. Data backup enthusiasts 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. Although 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 data that doesn't require superfast transfer rates. 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.

You can save $50 on the list price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 26TB HDD, now only $299 at Best Buy. The large 26TB capacity means more room for your files, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds are fast enough for most storage and backup situations.

The Seagate Expansion external HHD is housed in a rugged black plastic chassis measuring about 7x2x5 inches with small feet on the bottom and power and USB cable connections at the rear of the drive. This unit has an external AC power adapter, which will need a power outlet to run.

The Seagate Expansion Desktop 26TB HDD comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable included in the box. 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 March 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Best Buy.

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.

Western Digital has introduced its highest-capacity hard disk drive for network-attached storage (NAS) systems—the WD Red Pro 26TB—and several direct-attached storage (DAS) systems aimed at creative professionals. These DAS offer capacities of up to 208TB and employ one to eight hard drives.

Western Digital's WD Red Pro 26TB hard drive (WD260KFGX) is based on the company's latest 11-platter helium-sealed platform with a 7200 RPM spindle speed and the OptiNAND technology. The drive leverages Western Digital's 2nd Generation energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR 2) platform and uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for predictable performance in all workloads. Speaking of performance, the WD Red Pro 26TB can boast a 272 MB/s transfer rate.

The WD Red Pro is designed for high-performance and enterprise-grade NAS, so it is equipped to work in vibrating multi-user environments 24/7 and is rated for a 550TB workload per year. In particular, the hard drive comes equipped with rotation vibration sensors that foresee and automatically counteract turbulences caused by increased vibration and multi-axis shock sensors to detect shock events and proactively compensate them with the fly height technology.

The WD Red Pro 26TB has a five-year warranty and an MSRP of $569.99.

In addition to introducing a new NAS HDD, Western Digital expanded its DAS and NAS lineups. Interestingly, instead of using its WD Red Pro 26TB hard drives, the company uses its Ultrastar DC HD590 26TB HDDs, which rely on a similar platform.

Western Digital's most basic DAS is the G-Drive, which now offers a capacity of up to 26TB for $649.99. The unit has a 10 Gb/s USB Type-C interface and offers read speeds of up to 260 MB/s and write speeds of up to 270 MB/s. As the product is aimed at creative professionals, it comes in a stackable, anodized aluminum chassis with anchor points for secure attachment to DIT (digital imaging technician) production carts, mounting plates, or other gear.

For those who need something more advanced, Western Digital has G-Drive Project, which now offers up to 26TB of HDD storage, a SanDisk Professional PRO-BLADE SSD Mag slot for an SSD installation, and two Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports for connectivity. This one cost $999.99.

For those who need a lot of storage space on their desktop, Western Digital offers the G-RAID Project 2, with two 3.5-inch bays and a maximum capacity of 52TB, for $1,699.99.

Western Digital also expanded the G-RAID Shuttle 4, with four 3.5-inch bays and a maximum capacity of 104TB, for $4,499.99, and the G-RAID Shuttle 8, with eight 3.5-inch bays and a maximum capacity of 208TB, for $8,299.99. These devices support RAID modes for performance and redundancy and have two Thunderbolt 3 ports. They are set to the default RAID 5 with the higher-end devices delivering transfer speeds up to 1700 MB/s for reading and 1500 MB/s for writing.

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.