Seagate has announced the global availability of its new 30TB Exos M and IronWolf Pro hard drives, marking a significant milestone in high-capacity enterprise storage solutions. These drives, built on Seagate’s advanced Mozaic 3+ platform and powered by heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, respond to the surging demand for scalable, high-performance storage catalysed by the rapid expansion of AI workloads across various industries.
The deployment of AI is transforming data centre architectures worldwide, driving the need for storage that can handle massive datasets efficiently. Melyssa Banda, Seagate’s Senior Vice President of Edge Storage and Services, highlighted this shift towards edge computing, noting that while about 90% of the world’s data currently resides in just 10 countries, new data sovereignty requirements are decentralising data storage environments. Nearly 150 countries now enforce these mandates, pushing networks closer to the edge where AI workloads thrive, especially in on-premises, private, and sovereign datacentres.
Seagate’s 30TB drives are designed to meet these evolving demands by providing the necessary capacity, resilience, and power efficiency required for intensive AI processes. Industry analysts emphasise the strategic importance of such high-capacity hard drives in AI infrastructure. Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC, described the current phase as an “all-out arms race” among hyperscalers and enterprise data centres to develop AI infrastructure. He noted that while high-capacity HDDs may not be synonymous with low latency, they are indispensable for the mass storage of foundational data crucial to training and refining AI models. The Exos M 30TB drive is currently the highest-density hard drive available, helping enterprises optimise data centre density, reduce power consumption, and meet stringent strategic storage requirements.
The surge in AI use cases, from video analytics and predictive maintenance to fraud detection, increasingly happens at the edge, boosting adoption of disaggregated storage architectures. These frameworks decouple compute and storage, providing greater flexibility and scalability. Seagate’s drives, particularly the Exos M 30TB, are tailored to support energy-efficient, high-capacity storage that enables real-time edge analytics without compromising performance.
On-premises network-attached storage (NAS) systems are evolving alongside these technologies into intelligent hubs capable of handling complex AI workloads such as image recognition and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The convergence of AI, IoT, and hybrid cloud environments intensifies demand for high-capacity NAS solutions that manage large unstructured data with low latency and high throughput. Industry players like QNAP and UGREEN acknowledge that integrating Seagate’s IronWolf Pro 30TB drives into their NAS systems provides the scalability and operational stability required for demanding local AI applications at the edge.
Seagate’s technological innovation is further underscored by its ongoing expansion of the Mozaic 3+ platform. While 30TB marks the current mainstream availability, the company has recently begun shipping samples of even larger 36TB Exos M drives, also HAMR-based. These drives boast areal densities surpassing 3TB per platter, with future plans to reach 4TB and 5TB per platter, promising continued advances in storage scale and efficiency for enterprise data centres.
The HAMR technology itself employs a nanophotonic laser to heat targeted disk spots, enabling higher data density without sacrificing reliability. This allows Seagate’s latest drives to achieve sequential transfer rates around 275 to 292 MB/s, with robust input/output operations per second suitable for AI-related tasks like large dataset backups or streaming.
Seagate’s 30TB and 28TB Exos M and IronWolf Pro drives are now broadly accessible via authorised resellers in regions including Australia and New Zealand. They present a compelling option for organisations seeking to future-proof their storage infrastructure against the increasing demands of AI and edge computing.
As AI workloads continue migrating closer to data sources at the edge, securing high-capacity, efficient, and reliable storage remains critical. Seagate’s latest offerings reflect this vital intersection of technological innovation and market need, positioning the company as a key player in the evolving landscape of enterprise storage solutions.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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