When SSDs became so cheap, there was talk of the death of traditional hard drives, but the main brands that developed them did not want to give up. An HDD could not compete in terms of speed, but it could improve its strongest point, storage capacity. Offering many more TB for a lower price than what it would cost to buy equivalent SSDs was the only way to get ahead. So, Western Digital and Seagate, which are the leaders in the sector, began to release higher-capacity hard drives and compete with each other.
Details about the Seagate 36TB Hard Drive
First, we saw 30TB HDDs, then 32GB HDDs, and now Seagate has gone up to 36TB using 10 magnetic platters, setting a new capacity record for a 3.5″ format. Seagate has now achieved a capacity of 3.6TB per platter using HAMR without the need for SMR. In comparison, Western Digital achieved 32TB with SMR, but with CMR (conventional recording method) it was left with 26TB on 11 platters, which means 2.4TB on each platter.
The latest Seagate 36TB drives belong to the Mozaic 3+ series, which are the first commercial drives with HAMR technology. The first of these came out with 30TB thanks to CMR, but then they reached 32TB with SMR and now we have this new version with 4TB more. With Seagate 36TB Hard Drive, the company is unstoppable if we take into account that it has demonstrated in its laboratory that 6TB per platter or even more can be achieved.
While Seagate is currently in the lead, its biggest problem is low availability, as these 36TB hard drives are only being sent to customers for qualification, so they can’t really be purchased in large quantities. On the other hand, competition from Western Digital and Toshiba could make things difficult for Seagate, although they can’t compete for now.
