Seagate started shipping hard drives with HAMR tech in December 2024, turning a long-awaited technological advancement into a commercial reality. Now, the storage specialist is announcing

Seagate announced that they are shipping 36TB HAMR evaluation drives to customers. A study shows AI will drive demand for storage solutions, such as these.

Seagate is the only data storage company that can achieve areal densities of 3.6TB per hard drive platter today, with a pathway to increasing per-platter capacity to 10TB.

"Seagate continues to lead in areal density, sampling drives on the Exos M platform of up to 36TB today," said Dave Mosley, Seagate CEO. Also, we are executing on our innovation roadmap, having now successfully demonstrated capacities of over 6TB per disk within our test lab environments."

Seagate 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.

Seagate is exclusively adopting HAMR technology with its new 36TB Exos M HDD, moving away from CMR and SMR. This results in a 25% reduction in cost per TB, which is critical to maintaining the capacity-to-price ratio that keeps HDDs still relevant in an industry where SSDs offer faster speeds and are increasingly cheaper.