Seagate drives reach 30TB
NOW JUST THREE MANUFACTURERS of hard drives are left, so competition is spirited. Seagate is shipping qualification samples of its new 30TB drives to its data center customers. These are the highest-capacity drives yet, beating 26TB drives from Western Digital and Toshiba. These use second generation Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, which uses a laser in the drive head that heats a grain (data bit) on the platter surface, enabling the recording head to flip the polarity without affecting its neighbors. HAMR requires new actuator heads and new recording media. This isn’t cheap, so these drives are aimed at large-scale commercial operations using Seagate’s CORVAULT systems. Of more practical interest is the new 22TB IronWolf Pro, a conventional 3.5in ten-platter SATA III drive. Officially it sells for $599, but has been seen discounted to $399, which equates to $18 per terabyte.
Meanwhile, Seagate picked-up a $300 million fine from the Department of Commerce for violation of export controls. It shipped 7.4 million hard drives to Huawei in 2020 and 2021, becoming its sole supplier. WD and Toshiba obeyed the export controls. It’s estimated that the fine is about twice the profit earned. Despite the advantages of solid state, the HDD is a long way from dead, even in the desktop market, but sales aren’t strong. In the first quarter of the year they were down by 35 percent over last year. Samsung plans to have 100TB HDDs by 2025, as do its rivals, so if you need serious amounts of data storage, the spinning disc is still king.