Seagate’s 30TB+ Drives Redefine Storage Landscape

Seagate® Technology Holdings plc , among global leaders in sustainable mass-data storage solutions, has announced a significant milestone that signifies a new era in the storage industry.

The company has introduced the Mozaic 3+™ hard drive platform, featuring Seagate’s pioneering implementation of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. This launch ushers in unprecedented areal densities of 3TB+ per platter, with a roadmap set to achieve 4TB+ and 5TB+ per platter in the coming years.

The Mozaic 3+ platform is the powerhouse behind Seagate’s flagship Exos® product family, boasting industry-leading capacity points of 30TB and beyond. Exos 30TB+ products are now shipping in volume this quarter to hyperscale cloud customers.

Seagate’s groundbreaking areal density innovation, which increases the storage capacity per platter, addresses common industry challenges. The Mozaic 3+ platform empowers customers to store more data within the same physical space than ever before. Transitioning from a 16TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drive, the average capacity in large-scale data centers, to an Exos 30TB Mozaic 3+ technology drive effectively doubles the capacity in the same footprint.

Remarkably, the Mozaic 3+ platform achieves this while using similar material components as PMR hard drives, resulting in a substantial reduction in storage acquisition and operational costs, including a 40% improvement in per terabyte power consumption. Moreover, Mozaic 3+ contributes to sustainability goals, with a 55% reduction in embodied carbon per terabyte when compared to a traditional 16TB PMR drive.

Seagate is experiencing strong demand from data center customers, expected to complete qualification of Mozaic 3+ and transition to volume production by the end of this quarter. A leading cloud service provider is actively shifting the majority of Seagate-provided drives to Mozaic 3+, underscoring their confidence in the technology.

Dave Mosley, Seagate’s CEO, emphasized, “Seagate is the world’s only hard drive manufacturer with the areal density capability to get to 3TB per platter and with 5TB on the horizon. As AI use cases put a premium on raw data sets, more companies are going to need to store all the data they can. To accommodate the resulting masses of data, areal density matters more than ever.”

Mosley highlighted that the Mozaic 3+ platform comprises several industry-first innovations beyond HAMR technology, including:

1. Superlattice Platinum-Alloy Media: Introducing a pioneering iron-platinum superlattice structure that significantly increases magnetic coercivity, allowing for precise data writing and unprecedented bit stability.
2. Plasmonic Writer: Featuring Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR with a nanophotonic laser to produce a precise heat spot on the media surface for reliable data writing.
3. Gen 7 Spintronic Reader: Incorporating quantum technology, Mozaic 3+ includes one of the world’s smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors for effective data retrieval.
4. 12nm Integrated Controller: A sophisticated application-specific integrated circuit, developed in-house, delivering up to 3 times the performance compared to prior solutions.

Seagate plans to vertically integrate the nanophotonic laser into the plasmonic writer sub-system, ensuring greater efficiency and yield to support rapid scaling of volume production.

John Rydning, Research Vice President IDC Global DataSphere, commented, “Seagate’s innovative areal density breakthrough is timely and will enable it to deliver increasingly higher capacity hard drive products for many years.”

Beyond data centers, Mozaic 3+ storage technology is set to empower a wide range of use cases, spanning enterprise, edge, NAS, and video and imaging applications (VIA) markets.

To learn more about Mozaic 3+ technologies and products, visit.