Seagate Launches 30TB HAMR Hard Drives in a Pitch to AI Data Center Builders

Seagate has launched two new 30TB hard drives based on its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, which enables far greater data density on the individual platters. The new Exos M 30TB and IronWolf Pro 30TB units are now widely available and marketed to data center builders looking to max out their storage capacity for large AI training data, as well as edge-case inferencing.

Although AI tends to run best on fast storage hardware like SSDs, the incredible pace of AI adoption and development around the world is creating a scramble for hardware. That’s mostly led to companies battering down Nvidia’s door to get more graphics chips. But AI needs lots of storage space, too, and Seagate is keen for its hard drives to be a part of that buildout of new AI infrastructure, or “AI factories,” as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang calls them.

As The Register highlights, Seagate’s 30TB hard drives bring it to effective capacity parity with rivals like Western Digital and Toshiba, which have their own 30TB+ storage solutions. The brand is pitching them as a cost-effective way to get masses of storage space in your data center.

HAMR can also help improve efficiency, too.
Credit: Seagate

We have UK prices for the drives, which gives us a rough idea of their global pricing. Pounds, dollars, and euros are interchangeable in this context, so the £499 price tag for the Exos M 30TB is probably going to work out to $499 before taxes. The IronWolf Pro 30TB’s £559 price tag will probably mean a $559 price in the US, too.

Although Seagate and others have previously complained about AI and data center buildouts causing shortages and price increases on hard drives (alongside other hardware), Seagate now appears to be embracing the trend and potential opportunity.

It’s not alone, either. Ed Burns, IDC research director for hard drive and storage technologies, said: “While not often associated with performance such as low latency, the highest capacity HDDs are a critical strategic asset in the AI development process, filling the need for mass capacity storage of the foundational data essential to building and improving the highest quality AI models in the market today and into the future.”

Indeed, as companies and nation states push to develop and maintain their own internal and national AI systems, building out larger server clusters and data centers at the edge will become increasingly common. For enterprises and entities looking to do that without paying the higher costs of SSD storage, hard drives like these might offer a less performant, but certainly more cost-effective solution.

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