- Seagate says it has achieved 6.9TB of platters in its lab using HAMR technology
- Outgoing 30TB drives use ten 3TB platters for maximum storage space
- Intermediate 4TB, 5TB and 6TB boards will enter production in 2027-2029
Seagate has announced that it has successfully developed 6.9 TB platters in its laboratory, marking a major milestone in the future of hard drive technology.
The company says these experimental platters more than double the capacity of those used in current commercial drives.
Outgoing models, such as Seagate’s 30TB HAMR hard drives, use ten 3TB platters to reach maximum capacity.
HAMR technology and storage density
With the new 6.9 TB platters, a single hard drive could achieve between 55 TB and 69 TB while maintaining the same physical form factor.
This level of storage density has not yet been implemented in consumer or enterprise products, but it demonstrates the physical limits of modern HAMR technology.
The high-capacity platters rely on Seagate’s heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, which applies heat to reduce magnetic coercivity during the writing process.
This makes it possible to store data closer than on conventional hard drives.
In current drives, HAMR is combined with techniques such as Mozaic 3+ to reduce media grain size and improve recording precision.
By applying these advances to larger platters, Seagate created the potential for drives that could store more than twice the data of existing models without increasing size or weight.
Seagate has indicated that 6.9TB drives will not be used in official products until around 2030.
Before then, the company is developing intermediate slabs of 4TB, 5TB and 6TB, with expected production in 2027, 2028 and 2029 respectively.
After 2031, Seagate projects even larger platters from 7 TB to 15 TB, suggesting the possibility of petabyte-sized hard drives before 2040.
Despite the rise of SSDs, hard drives remain essential for large-scale storage due to their superior capacity per dollar and long-term reliability.
The AI boom has intensified demand, resulting in expanded backorders for enterprise-class drives.
While consumer-focused storage solutions like USB drives and smaller SSDs are gaining popularity, high-capacity hard drives remain the backbone of data centers and archive storage.
Via TomsHardware
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
