Subj : Seagate reportedly sold two billion GBs worth of storage to two o
To   : All
From : TechnologyDaily
Date : Sun Mar 16 2025 18:45:08

Seagate reportedly sold two billion GBs worth of storage to two of the 
world's largest tech companies

Date:
Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:34:00 +0000

Description:
Seagate recently sold one exabytes worth of HAMR HDDs to two of the world's 
largest tech companies.

FULL STORY
======================================================================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 doesnt 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 HAMRs 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 Seagates fight to store the worlds data, and mentioned something 
which caught my attention. Seagate said two large cloud-computing customers 
have each ordered one exabytes worth of HAMR storage, which works out to tens 
of thousands of hard drives. 

Keilman didnt name names - Seagate wouldnt 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. 
Its possible that Chinese hyperscalers could have come shopping for the 
drives, but that seems unlikely to me. 

Keilman doesnt say what capacity drives were sold, but we can assume they 
will have been Seagates highest commercial HDD, the Exos M, which ranges from 
30TB (CMR) to 36TB (SMR), with a breakthrough 3TB-per-platter density. Based 
on timing, its likely were 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. You might also like These are the fastest hard drives you 
can buy right now And these are largest SSDs and HDDs on the planet Hundreds 
of the world's largest hard disk drive have gone on sale online



======================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/pro/seagate-reportedly-sold-two-billion-gbs-worth-of
-storage-to-two-of-the-worlds-largest-tech-companies


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