Despite the unstoppable rise of flash SSDs, good old hard disk drives (HDDs) remain an absolutely critical component and the backbone of data centers around the world. Now Seagate is raising the bar to unprecedented heights, demonstrating a colossal breakthrough in laboratory conditions that could fundamentally change the data storage landscape.
The company has achieved a staggering 6.9TB capacity on a single magnetic platter. According to IT Home, this experimental result opens up the possibility of creating commercial hard drives with final capacities between 55 and 69 TB!
Seagate's achievement is extremely dramatic, as the capacity of this experimental platter of 6.9 TB is more than twice that of the platters currently used in mass commercial products.
For comparison, Seagate's previous flagship models, such as the 30 TB HAMR hard drive, used ten platters, each with a capacity of 3 TB. With the new 6.9 TB platters, the company will be able to produce drives with twice the capacity in the same physical form factor – without having to increase the volume or number of components.
To achieve this record-breaking leap, Seagate has combined two key innovations:
Thermal Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology: This is the main recording method that allows for much denser data storage.
Mozaic 3+ technology: It further reduces the grain size of the recording media, allowing for incredible data density compared to conventional HDD platters.
Although the results are inspiring, 6.9TB platters are still far from mass production. According to Seagate's roadmap, these platters will not appear in official products until 2030 – that is, after at least five years of further development and optimization.
In the meantime, the company is not idle: it is developing platters with capacities of 4, 5 and 6 TB, which are expected to enter production in 2027, 2028 and 2029 respectively. Seagate's ambitions do not stop there, however. The company predicts that platters with capacities between 7 and 15 TB will be available by 2031. If these forecasts are confirmed, Seagate could produce hard drives with capacities of petabytes (1024 TB) by 2040.
The continued increase in HDD capacity is vital to meet the unstoppable growth in demand. Although SSDs are gaining popularity, HDDs remain the basis for long-term data storage, thanks to their lower cost per gigabyte and higher reliability for large-scale backups. Even the current AI boom is "swallowing" orders for new HDDs, with some manufacturers already promising deliveries with only a two-year delay for models designed for data centers.