https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/seagates-massive-30tb-600-hard-drives-are-now-available-for-anyone-to-buy/

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if all you have is a HAMR...

Seagate's massive, 30TB, $600 hard drives are now available for
anyone to buy

Seagate's heat-assisted drive tech has been percolating for more than
20 years.

Andrew Cunningham - Jul 15, 2025 5:44 pm | 28
[nanoscale-023-440x1080-1-640x480] 
[nanoscale-023-440x1080-1-1152x648]
Credit: Seagate
Credit: Seagate
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For more than two decades, hard drive manufacturer Seagate has been
experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology
for increasing hard drive density--drives that use tiny lasers to heat
up and expand parts of the drive platter, write data, and then shut
off to allow the platter to cool and contract, all within less than a
nanosecond.

After decades of overly rosy availability predictions, Seagate
announced in late 2024 that it was finally delivering HAMR-based
drives with capacities of up to 36TB to some datacenter customers.
Today, the drives are finally available for end users and individual
IT administrators to buy, albeit only in smaller capacities for now.
Seagate and other retailers will sell you massive 30TB IronWolf Pro
and Exos M hard drives for $600, and 28TB drives for $570. Both
drives use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which
performs better than the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology
sometimes used to increase disk density.

The drives are based on Seagate's Mosaic 3+ platform, which
"incorporates Seagate's unique implementation of HAMR to deliver
mass-capacity storage at unprecedented areal densities of 3TB per
disk and beyond."

Seagate's press release is focused mostly on the large drives'
suitability for AI-related data storage--"AI" is mentioned in the body
text 21 times, and it's not a long release. But obviously, they'll be
useful for any kind of storage where you need as many TB as possible
to fit into as small a space as possible.

Although most consumer PCs have moved away from hard drives with
spinning platters, they still provide the best storage-per-gigabyte
for huge data centers where ultra-fast performance isn't necessary.
Huge data center SSDs are also available but at much higher prices.

Seagate competitor Western Digital says that its first HAMR-based
drives are due in 2027, though it has managed to reach 32TB using SMR
technology. Toshiba is testing HAMR drives and has said it will
sample some drives for testing in 2025, but it hasn't committed to a
timeline for public availability.

Photo of Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter
Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus
on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of
operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in
Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
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