This Is Huge: A couple of years after first announcing its new magnetic storage platform, Mozaic 3+, Seagate is now ready to mass-market its first commercial HAMR-based HDDs. According to the storage specialist, hard disk drives are here to stay – especially as AI technologies demand massive amounts of storage to support the data-hungry needs of modern large language models and generative systems.
Seagate has officially announced global availability of its first high-capacity hard disk drives based on HAMR technology, targeting the mass-market storage segment. The new 30TB Exos M and IronWolf Pro HDDs are built on the Mozaic 3+ platform, the branding Seagate adopted for its first HAMR-powered drives to reach retail shelves.
The US company has made substantial investments in heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, which promises major gains in both data density and drive reliability. HAMR works by using a laser diode embedded in the drive’s read/write heads to briefly heat a tiny area of the recording medium. This highly localized heating, which occurs in less than a nanosecond, allows for much greater data density when storing digital bits.
Seagate first introduced the Mozaic 3+ platform in 2024, publishing a dedicated product page by the end of that year. In early 2025, the company began sampling its first 36TB HAMR drives to select customers for testing and validation. CEO Dave Mosley revealed that engineers had already achieved an areal density of 6TB per platter in lab conditions, with plans to push that figure to 10TB per platter in future iterations.
Seagate now expects to produce 100TB hard drives by 2030, driven by advancements in HAMR and other cutting-edge recording technologies.
As part of the announcement of its new 30TB Exos M and IronWolf Pro drives, the company emphasized that the unprecedented surge in AI infrastructure investment is expected to dramatically increase demand for high-capacity storage solutions.
According to Seagate’s SVP of Edge Storage and Services, Melyssa Banda, trends like data gravity and the rise of hybrid cloud are shifting network focus – and, by extension, storage needs – toward edge computing. Currently, around 90 percent of the world’s digital data is stored in just 10 countries, but nearly 150 countries are moving toward implementing local data residency requirements.
Seagate says the Mozaic 3+ platform was built to meet and exceed these evolving demands. The new Exos M and IronWolf Pro drives, available through Seagate’s store and authorized resellers, offer capacities of up to 30TB. Both models use conventional magnetic recording technology, which delivers more consistent input/output performance compared to SMR-based drives.
The Exos M is designed for enterprise-grade storage deployments, while the IronWolf Pro targets 24/7 NAS environments in RAID configurations. Pricing for the 30TB models is set at $600, while the 28TB versions are priced at $570 – well within expectations for users with extreme storage needs.