Seagate is providing 22 TB HDDs with classic SMR technology to a handful of customers. In doing so, the manufacturer is squeezing the most out of the technology.
Hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate has begun selling 22 TB HDDs. The new drives currently have the highest capacity on the market, but Seagate is only supplying them to a select audience. These include data centers. So you can’t immediately snap up the drives to expand the capacity of your server or NAS.
SMR
Seagate builds the drives with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. SMR provides higher capacity than Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) but is otherwise less performant. Data tracks are stuck together very tightly, making it impossible for the disk to rewrite a single track. If you want to modify data, an SMR-HDD must rewrite an entire area of several tracks. Therefore, the drives are especially suitable for archiving data.
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Seagate starts sales of 22 TB HDDs
Although SMR technology allows higher capacities compared to CMR, it too is running into its limits. Manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital are therefore looking to new technology such as Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to cram even more bits and bytes into a small footprint. That Seagate can build this 22 TB drive without HAMR technology is therefore a feat of engineering.
Variant on existing discs
The 22 TB drives are believed to be an SMR variant of the Exos 20 and IronWolf Pro 20 TB that the company introduced late last year. Those drives have a maximum capacity of 20 TB but use the higher-performance CMR technology.
For the future, Seagate is continuing to work on HAMR drives. These should come to the broader market in the future, but the manufacturer does not yet know when. By 2030, Seagate does expect to offer HAMR drives with a capacity of 100 TB.
HDDs are no longer relevant in consumer scenarios, where SSDs are largely the norm. Flash storage, however, is too expensive for mass storage, so HDDs do remain very relevant in storage servers and data centers in general.