Seagate's new Exos M and IronWolf Pro 30TB drives are built for on-premises AI

The Seagate Exos M and IronWolf Pro drives, built on the company's Mozaic3+ platform with HAMR technology, are now widely available in 28TB and 30TB capacities. With the AI boom, Seagate is positioning its new high-capacity HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) drives as the solution for the increasing demand for scalable storage in data centers and on-premises systems.

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HAMR technology, which opens the door to larger-capacity magnetic drives (the traditional platter variety), incorporates new cooling features for its powerful laser to maintain low operating temperatures without compromising a drive's reliability. Having access to 30TB on a single drive is fantastic for AI, as the more complex an AI system becomes, the more memory and storage it requires.

Seagate has confirmed that it has shipped over one million Mozaic drives, with the milestone attributed to the AI boom and the fact that its Seagate Exos M and IronWolf Pro drives represent the highest density drives offered in the market today.

"Enterprise customers are seeking ways to improve the density of their data centers, lowering power consumption and square footage requirements while ensuring storage continues to meet strategic requirements, and Seagate's new 30TB Exos product is the highest density hard drive offered in the industry today," said Ed Burns, Research Director, Hard Disk Drive and Storage Technologies at IDC. "Hyperscale and enterprise data center customers looking for optimal performance and cost tradeoffs for mass-capacity storage will benefit from Seagate's HAMR product roadmap, which is poised to accelerate areal density growth rates for HDDs in the years to come."

Now, with AI, speed is key, which is why NVIDIA or AMD GPUs with ample VRAM are a crucial component of any AI system. Seagate Exos M and IronWolf Pro drives provide cost-effective storage capacity for the growing on-premises AI market, which is forecasted to reach $42 billion within the next three years. This includes the use of local AI for image recognition, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and inferencing, with NAS systems.

Both the Seagate Exos M and NAS-ready IronWolf Pro 30TB drives are available with a $599.99 MSRP.