Seagate smashes largest HDD world record with 36TB hard drive and reveals a 60TB model is coming

Seagate added a 36TB Exos M model to its growing family of datacenter hard disk drives, making it the largest hard disk drive currently available. The yet-to-be-named device is based on the company's mature Mozaic 3+ platform and has been shipped to select customers, most likely hyperscalers like Microsoft or AWS.

The US storage company added a 32TB Exos M in December 2024, almost a year after it added its previous largest drive, a 30TB model. Rival Western Digital has a 32TB HDD in its line up but unlike Seagate, uses 11 platters (rather than 10) to reach this capacity. The same goes for Toshiba; the Japanese firm tested 31TB and 32TB models with 10 and 11 platters.

Platter capacity is something Seagate has been keen to tout as a unique selling point; its press release mentions it is the only data storage company able to achieve areal densities of 3.6TB per platter with a pathway to 10TB in the future. That's a whopping 100TB hard drive in the pipeline.

60TB HDDs coming soon

Seagate's CEO, Dave Mosley, also disclosed that the company has successfully demonstrated platter capacities of over 6TB per platter in lab environments. This means 60TB hard drives are within reach and should arrive before the end of the decade (or as in marketing lingo, depending on market conditions).

"CMR & SMR are different to HAMR, even with HAMR we still use CMR & SMR and we have not moved away from it," a Seagate spokesperson told us.

"Both CMR & SMR are the way in which [sic] we place data on the platters, conventional (CMR) or shingled (SMR), whereas HAMR is a technology used to write the data with Heat compared to previous methods."

Heat-assisted magnetic recording, Seagate says, enables a 25% cost reduction per TB and a 60% decrease in power consumption per TB. This relentless drive towards cheaper storage is what will keep HDD relevant despite SSDs supremacy on performance, storage density and power consumption.