Seagate – Seagate is on track to have 30TB hard drives in 2023

The company, in fact, according to Nexus for gamers, announced that larger-capacity hard drives would follow, with Seagate estimating that by 2026 it will have more than 50 terabytes of hard drives ready. The timeline the company mentioned during the conference call is in line with Seagate’s roadmap, which was shared during a conference call with analysts and investors in March 2021.

These extremely large capacities are made possible by a technology called Hammer or magnetic recording with the help of heat. Seagate has made great strides in the research and development of HAMR technology (at least since 2015, when it showed the first working prototypes). The first commercially available HAMR hard drives were released in 2019. HAMR technology faces significant technical challenges, as the heating, writing, and cooling of the recording area takes place within nanoseconds.

Several changes must be made at the technological level – beyond the use of HAMR technology – to reach higher capacity goals, as you will also need to upgrade components such as the reading head or the recording medium on the magnetic disks (platters). All of these changes will drive up costs, but the massive and ever-increasing demand for greater data density in data centers shows no signs of abating.