Seagate is raising the roof on hard disk drive (HDD) storage limits this year, with the promise that it’ll be introducing 30TB+ drives from Q3 2023. These drives will be the world’s first to hit these storied heights, and will become possible due to Seagate’s heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.
But before those drives hit, Seagate will also be releasing some larger HDDs for its more regular ranges. Seagate is planning to release some 22TB and 24TB drives in Q1 or Q2 of this year, and these drives will replace the 22TB and 24TB drives that currently sit as Seagate’s top of the line HDDs.
It’s fair to say even those beefy drives pale in comparison to the 30TB and more monsters that are on the way, thanks to the second generation of Seagate’s HAMR technology. However, you’re unlikely to be sticking one in your gaming rig any time soon, as these drives will mostly be winging their way to hyperscale cloud datacenters, rather than home computers. But Seagate hopes to start making strides towards introducing HAMR drives accessible to more customers, and you’ll start seeing them available in mid-range and even entry-level computers eventually. Seagate has to be hoping this will be possible soon, as such a move is likely to boost its bottom line -- especially important, since Seagate just posted its first loss in years.
Seagate has also reported its looking even higher, and has claimed to have managed to cram 5TB onto a single 3.5-inch disk in the lab. While there’s still a lot of work to be done on this, if easily repeatable and manufacturable, then this could lead to drives with 50TB of storage space -- a truly enormous amount of storage for anyone.
It’s great news for those of us who shamefully have to admit to keeping all of our old data stored away. After all, who knows when you might need those Battlefield 1942 mod installers? With future hard disk drives being able to potentially store our entire childhoods and lots more regardless, the days of worrying about storage could be well behind us.