Contrary to what many people may think, mechanical hard drives are far from being an outdated storage medium from the 1990s. No, technology has developed at a rapid pace even in this area, alongside a world that mainly talks about NVMe drives. But out in the server rooms, there are grotesque amounts of data to be stored, and spinning metal platters are still king.
With its new 44 TB (!) hard drives, Seagate is now taking the next step, with the help of the latest Mozaic 4+ platform, which uses the wonderfully futuristic-sounding HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology. In practice, this means that a microscopic laser heats up the surface of the disk when data is written, allowing the information to be packed much more densely than before. The result is that each magnetic plate can store more than 4 TB of data.
If you put ten platters in the same drive—which is what Seagate is doing here—you end up with a somewhat absurd final capacity of 44 terabytes. Yes, thank you very much, many times larger than what has been available so far and a dream for anyone with a NAS or two at home or in the office.
Unfortunately, deliveries are currently primarily going to data centres. So all of us DIYers will have to wait patiently. Seagate is also far from alone in trying to squeeze more and more data into classic hard drives. Western Digital is working in parallel on its own solutions to reach 40 TB and above, and the entire industry is chasing the same goal: more storage per disk.
Can we perhaps look forward to 50 TB disks in a year or two? Yes, if the industry's plans hold, it shouldn't take very long.
Would you have any use for one of these enormous hard drives?