Seagate is now shipping its 30TB hard drives. This is something that we have been waiting for in the industry for some time. The new models are in two lines, both the Seagate IronWolf Pro and Exos M. With an IronWolf Pro model, we have a model that is finally designed for adoption by even prosumers.
Seagate Shipping 30TB HAMR IronWolf Pro and Exos M Hard Drives
The new drives use Seagate’s Mozaic3+ platform. Perhaps the bigger piece is that these are HAMR drives. HAMR stands for heat-assisted magnetic recording and is something that Seagate has been working on for years. Seagate says that it has now shipped over 1 million Mosaic drives.
Both drives target different markets. The Seagate Exos M is for larger scale data center deployments while the IronWolf Pro is more for NAS units. Both drives have retail prices of $599.99 each. We expect the hyper-scalers to spend a lot less as they drive large volumes. Still, for $600, that is considerably less than the slightly larger but faster 30.72TB/ 32TB SSDs.
Final Words
Seagate is calling this a drive for the AI market. We expect it more to be used simply in mass storage tiers. Most of those doing very high-volume AI inference or training will utilize SSDs instead of hard drives for their primary storage. Having GPUs wait for hard drives to deliver data tends to lead to extremely poor ROI. Even when it comes to caching using SSDs in front of hard drives, we are seeing most of those installations go to high-capacity and high-performance SSDs. Big iron AI servers topped having 3.5″ drive bays generations ago and the arrays are moving to SSDs. On the other hand, there is a looming challenge with storing the results of generative AI clusters for compliance purposes at a low cost so perhaps that is a good place for hard drives in AI.
A bigger impact is for all of us digital packrats who store everything and simply need more storage in our arrays.
It would be nice to call out the actual differences between Exos M and IronWolf beyond their target markets. If they coat the same, what are the pros and cons of each?
This is a huge leap for storage fans—30TB is seriously impressive! HAMR tech finally coming to shelves feels like the future arrived early. Can’t wait to see how these perform over time!
Senza, the EXOS is helium filled and is therefore more thermal and power efficient, as well as with a better MTBF. I believe the IronWolf is supposed to be quieter than the EXOS, but don’t qoute me on that.
I have both EXOS 18 TB and IronWolf 12 and 14 TB in Synology rackstations.
After 5 years, EXOS are still perfect but not all the IronWolf.
Also, for some unknown reasons, I can buy EXOS cheaper than their Ironwolf counterpart in Germany.
It’s HAMR time! Get it? HAMR. I’m here all week….
Sorry, couldn’t help myself. I’ll see me out now.