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- Despite predictions, HDDs are here to stay and increasing in capacity
- Seagate recently sold one exabyte of HAMR storage to two hyperscalers
- The “tens of thousands of drives” likely cost between $33 and $35 million
Although the likes of Pure Storage, IBM, and Meta believe the writing is on the wall for hard drives, the technology doesn’t look like it will be going away any time soon.
Seagate and its main rival Western Digital are working on magnetic recording methods that will allow the drives to continue increasing in capacity, helping them maintain a clear advantage over SSDs when it comes to storage density.
The main technology leading this charge is HAMR, or heat-assisted magnetic recording, which could see HDDs hitting incredible 100TB capacities. HAMR works by briefly heating the disk surface with a laser to make it easier to write data at higher densities. HDMR – short for heated dot magnetic recording – is HAMR’s likely successor and could lead to even larger drives by focusing the heat and magnetic energy into smaller, more precise areas for even denser data storage.
Not an unreasonable outlay
In a recent The Wall Street Journal article, John Keilman wrote an article covering Seagate’s “fight to store the world’s data”, and mentioned something which caught my attention. “Seagate said two large cloud-computing customers have each ordered one exabyte’s worth of HAMR storage, which works out to tens of thousands of hard drives.”
Keilman didn’t name names – Seagate wouldn’t have told him who the buyers were – but we can narrow the list of suspects down to the usual big US hyperscalers, including Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta. It’s possible that Chinese hyperscalers could have come shopping for the drives, but that seems unlikely to me.
Keilman doesn’t say what capacity drives were sold, but we can assume they will have been Seagate’s highest commercial HDD, the Exos M, which ranges from 30TB (CMR) to 36TB (SMR), with a breakthrough 3TB-per-platter density. Based on timing, it’s likely we’re talking about the 30TB models, as the 32TB drive was only added to the range in December 2024, followed by the 36TB model just a month later.
Assuming the hyperscalers in question paid bulk pricing of around $500 per drive (refurbished models of Seagate’s Exos 28TB HDD can currently be purchased for as low as $365), their combined bill likely came to somewhere between $33 and $35 million. For a full exabyte of cutting-edge, high-capacity storage, $16 billion or so isn’t an unreasonable outlay.
Seagate previously revealed that a 60TB drive was on its way, and the firm recently announced plans to acquire Intevac, a HAMR specialist, which could help it achieve that 100TB capacity goal faster, as well as ramp up HAMR drive production.