Seagate has begun shipping 44 TB HDDs.

      The American storage manufacturer Seagate has officially announced the start of mass shipments of 44 terabyte hard drives. This is an absolute record for the industry, made possible by years of research in magnetic recording. The new platform is called Mozaic 4+.

      Inside the hermetic enclosure of the new HDD, there are ten platters. Each of them, thanks to Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, holds more than 4 terabytes of data. During recording, a tiny laser beam with a diameter of just a few tens of nanometers heats a spot on the platter in fractions of a nanosecond. This temporarily reduces the coercivity* of the material, allowing a bit of data to be recorded, which retains stability after cooling. This method allows overcoming the physical limitations faced by traditional perpendicular recording technologies.

      Performance and Efficiency

      The new drives operate at a speed of 7200 RPM and provide a stable sequential data transfer rate of about 300 megabytes per second. But their main advantage is revealed at the scale of data centers. Seagate has calculated that when building an infrastructure of one exabyte, switching from 30-terabyte models to 44-terabyte ones provides huge savings. Operating costs are reduced by almost half, less manufacturing space is required, and annual energy consumption is reduced by about 800 thousand kilowatt-hours. For hyperscalers**, this means millions of dollars in savings.

      Who Has Already Received the New Products

      The drives have not yet appeared in retail and are not intended for ordinary users, as Seagate plans to focus on the corporate segment. The first batches have already been shipped to two of the largest cloud providers. Their names are not disclosed due to the terms of the agreements, but it is likely that these companies own large cloud services. Seagate emphasizes that these are not pilot samples, but rather commercial shipments of a finished product.

      Future Plans

      With the release of the 44-terabyte drives, Seagate has surged ahead in the HDD capacity race. Its main competitor, Western Digital, is only preparing to release its 40-terabyte models based on EAMR and UltraSMR technologies, which lag behind HAMR in recording density and access speed.

      Seagate asserts that 44 terabytes is not the maximum capacity of its new hard drive series. By 2030, the company intends to introduce a hard drive with a capacity of 100 terabytes. They plan to achieve this through further improvements to HAMR and increasing recording density to 10 terabytes per platter. Considering that Seagate remains the only vendor to have deployed HAMR on an industrial scale, it has every chance of being the first to reach this milestone as well.

      * Coercivity (coercive field) is the value of the intensity of the external magnetic field required for the complete demagnetization of a ferromagnetic material.

      **Hyperscalers are large technology companies that manage global networks of data centers and provide cloud services.