“Seagate’s new Exos M 30TB and IronWolf Pro 30TB are the first HAMR-based HDDs available in channel and retail markets, as previously the company only shipped such drives to select hyperscale customers.”
Seagate finally let the rest of us buy the laser-powered hard drives they’ve been shipping to hyperscalers for over a year. Thirty terabytes for $600 using heat-assisted magnetic recording, which works out to about $20 per terabyte. That’s still a premium over older drives, but Backblaze failure rates for HAMR are running at 0.35%, which is actually 30% lower than previous generation drives. The real news is the roadmap. With 3TB+ platters and 11-platter designs on the horizon, we’re looking at 40TB drives that will make these look quaint in short order.