Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Seagate Ships 30 TB Hard Drives for $600 Adam Engst In a press release that scores high on the buzzword count, [1]Seagate writes: Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a global leader in mass-capacity data storage, today announced the global channel availability of up to 30TB [2]Exos ®M and [3]IronWolf® Pro hard drives. Built on Seagate's Mozaic3+'¢ platform and powered by heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, these drives are engineered to meet increasing demand for scalable, high-performance storage driven by the rise of AI deployments that are supplementing traditional enterprise infrastructure development. My first hard drive in 1989 was a Seagate 30 MB drive (see '[4]The Mac Turns 25: Our First Macs,' 25 January 2009), so it's somewhat sobering to realize that these new Seagate 30 TB drives can store ([5]cue the Dr. Evil accent) one million times more data for $600. In fact, the 1989 drive (available for about $250) would cost roughly the same $600 in today's dollars, meaning that the price per megabyte has also dropped by a factor of one million, from $20 to $0.00002. Claims about AI aside, $600 isn't much if you need 30 TB of storage for any purpose. The hard part will be backing up that much data. [6]Read original article References Visible links 1. https://www.seagate.com/news/news-archive/seagate-ships-30tb-drives-to-meet-global-surge-in-data-center-ai-storage-demand-pr/ 2. https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-drives/exos/exos-m/?sku=ST30000NM004K&store=1 3. https://www.seagate.com/products/nas-drives/ironwolf-pro-hard-drive/?sku=ST30000NT011&store=1 4. https://tidbits.com/2009/01/25/the-mac-turns-25-our-first-macs/#:~:text=i%20had%2C%20somewhat%20earlier%2C%20built%20a%20hard%20drive%20for%20my%20atari%201040st%20(which%20had%20replaced%20my%20first%20computer%2C%20a%20franklin%20ace%201000%2C%20which%20was%20an%20apple%20%5D%5B%20clone)%20from%20a%20seagate%2030%20mb%20mechanism%2C%20a%20scsi%20controller%20board%2C%20and%20a%20massive%20case%20that%20could%20support%20up%20to%20five%20full-height%20drives. 5. https://youtu.be/EJR1H5tf5wE?t=15 6. https://www.seagate.com/news/news-archive/seagate-ships-30tb-drives-to-meet-global-surge-in-data-center-ai-storage-demand-pr/ Hidden links: 7. https://tidbits.com/uploads/2025/07/Dr-Evil-One-Million-scaled.jpg .