Seagate announces next-gen Mozaic hard drives with up to 44TB capacity

Seagate has announced its next-generation Mozaic 4+ storage platform, which leverages the company's heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) based storage technology. Qualified and currently in production, Seagate notes that its latest HAMR drives will support capacities up to 44TB in hyperscale environments.

Although they look like traditional platter hard drives, Seagate's HAMR-based storage opens the door to increased storage density and capacity through a process that uses lasers to heat and cool in nanoseconds. Currently, the 4+ TB of storage per-disk or layer has led to capacities reaching an impressive 44TB, with Seagate's roadmap forecasting a future where 10TB per-disk will enable drives with 100TB of storage.

To achieve higher capacity, Seagate has incorporated a next-gen suspension architecture and an enhanced system-on-a-chip for higher-density recording while maintaining "enterprise-class reliability." The big thing here is that these hard drives present a high-capacity, cost-efficient storage option for data centers and AI models that require and use large volumes of data for training and other purposes.

"The (Mozaic 4+) platform advances capacity per-rack and per-watt, improving data center efficiency, lowering total cost of ownership, and enabling organizations to preserve and reactivate data over time, sustainably," Seagate writes in the announcement. Adding that HAMR storage options enable AI infrastructure to scale without increasing the physical footprint or energy consumption. Essentially, Mozaic 4+ increases capacity per rack and per watt, lowering the total cost of ownership.

Seagate confirms that its Mozaic 4+ hard drives with up to 44TB are now "shipping in volume" to "two leading hyperscale cloud providers," with broader availability expected in the coming months as production scales.