Seagate is getting ready to release its biggest hard drive, featuring a 32 TB capacity through new Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology; this milestone comes after nearly a decade and a half of anticipation. Seagate first tested HAMR technology in 2007. The company has repeatedly promised that HAMR-based drives would be available within a few years; however, those predictions have been repeatedly postponed until now.

New Exos drives based on the Mozaic 3+ platform have been available in limited quantities for select customers. Now that they are in mass production, Seagate has quietly revealed the product page for its Exos M HDDs. The lineup includes a 32 TB model that uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology and a 30 TB model that uses Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). Seagate says its Exos M hard drive has a 3 TB per platter density.

Toshiba Electronic Components Taiwan Corporation (Toshiba) announces the Mx11 family of helium-sealed high-capacity HDDs. The Mx11 family includes the MG11 Series, which provides capacities of up to 24 TB using conventional magnetic recording (CMR), and the MA11 Series which offers up to 28 TB capacities with shingled magnetic recording (SMR).

The new Mx11 family is designed to deliver new levels of density and power efficiency to customers tasked with controlling (or managing) operational costs while meeting the relentless demands of data growth. Built on a common architecture, both products feature a 10-disk, helium-sealed, standard 3.5-inch 7,200rpm design that leverages Toshiba's innovative flux control microwave assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology. Engineered for higher performance and 24/7 reliability, the Mx11 family is designed with a 1GiB buffer, a workload rating of 550 TB per year, an MTTF/MTBF of 2.5 million hours, and an AFR of 0.35%.

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation (Toshiba) has successfully achieved storage capacities of over 30 TB with two next-generation large capacity recording technologies for hard disk drives (HDDs): Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR). The demonstration drives represent a major milestone in the advance toward commercial products based on each of these emerging recording formats.

HAMR, one of the two technologies that are driving forward next-generation high-capacity data recording, boosts magnetic recording capabilities by locally heating the disk with near-field light. Toshiba achieved 32 TB on 10 disks and adoption of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. Toshiba plans to start shipping test sample HDDs with HAMR technology in 2025.