Store your entire life on the first 22 tera hard drive

Until now, the largest storage capacity you could buy with a hard drive was 20TB. Manufacturers like Western Digital or Seagate drives offer 20 TB today, with ranges as Exos X20 or WD Gold. Now, a new battle for the 22 TB opens.

This was announced today by Seagate, which states that it has already begun to distribute the 22 TB units to the first buyers, as reported at the conference after the presentation of results. The new 22 TB are the hard drives with the highest capacity on the market today. To do this, they use Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), which makes them somewhat slower, but in return they can store more information in less space.

Store your entire life on the first 22 tera hard drive

22TB HDD Now Available for Data Centers

However, the units between 16 and 20 TB continue to use CMR, or Conventional Magnetic Recording, so the speed they reach is higher as they also have more magnetic plates and arms. The first 22TB drives are available only to a limited number of customers, primarily data centers looking to maximize storage space.

To get the most out of them, companies need to use software that writes data as sequentially as possible , avoiding random writes. Also, once the data is written, it is desirable that the written information be modified as little as possible to maintain predictable performance by the software.

Unfortunately, Seagate has not released the specifications for these drives, as their configuration may vary depending on customer requests in terms of performance and power consumption. However, using hardware similar to the 20TB Exos X20 range, we can see that maximum read transfer speeds can be up to 285MB/s.

seagate exos 20 tb

Seagate Exos X20 20TB Hard Drive

Hard drives will increase in capacity

Seagate is also working on hard drives that use HAMR , or Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, technology . Some customers already have the first test units, and are even using them on a limited basis to test their durability. Although this technology makes hard drives consume more energy, it also allows for higher speeds and capacities. In fact, Seagate claims that by 2030 they hope to be manufacturing 100TB hard drives.

Western Digital, for its part, is working on MAMR technology to achieve higher capacity. With HAMR, hard drive heads have a laser diode that heats a tiny spot on the drive for recording by reversing polarity, which is the principle behind today’s hard drives.

WD’s solution uses microwaves at frequencies between 20 and 40 GHz to generate a tiny vortex that changes the polarity of the bit to be modified. With it, it is possible to increase the density of hard drives.

In short, we see that hard drives are not going to disappear in the coming years, neither in data centers nor in computers or network storage devices. Where it is difficult to see them is already in laptops, where SSDs have won the game.