While NVMe SSDs are looking to get faster, good old spinning hard drives are looking to get bigger. Tom’s Hardware reports that hard drive manufacturer Seagate announced during a recent earnings report that it is supplying some of its customers with huge 22TB hard drives. The company is using tiled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to squeeze a couple more terabytes out of its largest drives.
The largest capacity drives most people can currently buy have a maximum capacity of 20TB; Seagate Ironwolf Pro or WD Gold are two such drives, and both usually sell for over $600. Seagate uses Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) technology in its NAS drives, which provides faster random read and write speeds than SMR drives, but at a lower density – good for archival storage, but not so much for servers that are regularly accessed. several users are contacting. and changing data. We saw this firsthand a few years ago when Western Digital secretly started using SMR technology in their WD Red consumer NAS drives.
In terms of larger capacity increases, Seagate continues to work on magnetically-recorded storage (HAMR) drives, which the company has been testing with some of its customers for several years. Seagate is certainly guilty of over-promising and under-delivering on HAMR, something the company has been talking about from time to time since 2002. But in early 2021, Seagate said it was targeting 30TB drives by 2023, 50TB drives by 2026, and 100TB drives by 2030.