Seagate started shipping hard drives with HAMR tech in December 2024, turning a long-awaited technological advancement into a commercial reality. Now, the storage specialist is announcing

Seagate is the only data storage company that can achieve areal densities of 3.6TB per hard drive platter today, with a pathway to increasing per-platter capacity to 10TB.

Seagate announced that they are shipping 36TB HAMR evaluation drives to customers. A study shows AI will drive demand for storage solutions, such as these.

Seagate is exclusively adopting HAMR technology with its new 36TB Exos M HDD, moving away from CMR and SMR. This results in a 25% reduction in cost per TB, which is critical to maintaining the capacity-to-price ratio that keeps HDDs still relevant in an industry where SSDs offer faster speeds and are increasingly cheaper.

Seagate on Tuesday stated that its Exos M hard drives, based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology (with capacity points of up to 32TB) has been adopted by a leading cloud service provider,