News Seagate launches 32TB Exos M hard drive based on HAMR technology – Mozaic 3+ drives are the world’s first generally available HAMR HDDs

[Admin]

The Exos M 32TB is now Seagate’s biggest hard drive, thanks to cutting-edge HAMR tech that finally materialized.

Seagate launches 32TB Exos M hard drive based on HAMR technology – Mozaic 3+ drives are the world’s first generally available HAMR HDDs : Read more

 

[pug_s]

I have a soft spot for HDD's. Recently my company are in the process of replacing servers and noticed that it is using 15.36tb nvme ssd in an 19mm 2.5 inch format. I'm sure that there are bigger ssd's in the same size now but this is what these 30tb hard drives are competing with.

 

[Pierce2623]

I have a soft spot for HDD's. Recently my company are in the process of replacing servers and noticed that it is using 15.36tb nvme ssd in an 19mm 2.5 inch format. I'm sure that there are bigger ssd's in the same size now but this is what these 30tb hard drives are competing with.

The pictore looks like this is a 3.5” drive so give the ssd more capacity. Spinning rust is dead.

 

[edzieba]

The pictore looks like this is a 3.5” drive so give the ssd more capacity. Spinning rust is dead.

Not for warm storage. HDDs are still king for cost/GB, and when you're looking at several PB storage across a few racks then that's a big chunk of change to drop on SSDs if you don't actually need their improved random read/write performance. 'Reliability' at scale is not as big a factor as you'd think, because you plan for failure (drive, controller, server, rack, and building) and design to tolerate it and fail over gracefully, so individual drive reliability as a metric only really affects how busy the tin-fondler in the data centre ends up being. You replace hardware when it leaves warranty anyway, so in-warranty failures are still only a labour overhead.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

The pictore looks like this is a 3.5” drive so give the ssd more capacity. Spinning rust is dead.

Everything has its place. Spinning rust is far from dead where massive amounts of storage are required.

My unraid has 3x16TB drives in it with a throughput of ~270MB/s read and write. That's almost enough to saturate my 2.5Gb network connection.

This setup is plenty good for a lot of use cases.

Big cloud providers like Vultr have spinning rust storage for dirt cheap, for good reason.

Now, if you need super fast access instead of massive storage, then SSD type storage is your thing.

People have been saying spinning rust is dead for many years now, and it's still not true.

 

[3en88]

People have been saying spinning rust is dead for many years now, and it's still not true.

Except that it is. It took them decades to bring HAMR to market but now it's too late. HDD prices have been going up, SSD prices have been going down. HDD capacities and speeds have stagnated, SSD capacities and speeds have grown exponentially. HDDs are designed to fail reliably after 5 years, SSDs can operate indefinitely depending on write rate.

 

[thestryker]

The pictore looks like this is a 3.5” drive so give the ssd more capacity. Spinning rust is dead.

90TB of spinning rust $1600 vs 90TB of SSD $9900, but sure it's dead.

If NAND could get down to double the cost it probably would be, but we're still nowhere near that.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

Except that it is. It took them decades to bring HAMR to market but now it's too late. HDD prices have been going up, SSD prices have been going down. HDD capacities and speeds have stagnated, SSD capacities and speeds have grown exponentially. HDDs are designed to fail reliably after 5 years, SSDs can operate indefinitely depending on write rate.

Prices may be as you say for smaller SSDs, however:

- There's a reliable robust recertified market out there. Every one of my 16TB drives I bought recertified with 5 year warranties. The most recent one I bought a few weeks ago for $160, including shipping. (It replaced two 9 year old 6TB drives that are still fully functional with no errors.)

- Large SSD prices are outrageous.

- SSD sizes aren't keeping pace with storage requirements. Everyone wants to store more data, and SSDs just don't cut it for that for most cases. Note I'm talking about "infrequently accessed but want to keep forever" cases like the "LAN drive" in corporate environments. (Not large LLM scanning of massive amounts of data cases.)

- Seagate and Western Digital clearly think spinning storage is alive and well, else they wouldn't be releasing humongous 30+ TB drives, with long term plans for much larger drives. They would not be targeting a niche market?

Personally I'm looking forward to when these 30TB drives are available recertified and 60TB drives are the latest bleeding edge.

 

[derekullo]

Everything has its place. Spinning rust is far from dead where massive amounts of storage are required.

My unraid has 3x16TB drives in it with a throughput of ~270MB/s read and write. That's almost enough to saturate my 2.5Gb network connection.

This setup is plenty good for a lot of use cases.

Big cloud providers like Vultr have spinning rust storage for dirt cheap, for good reason.

Now, if you need super fast access instead of massive storage, then SSD type storage is your thing.

People have been saying spinning rust is dead for many years now, and it's still not true.

Give ZFS a try and you'll saturate that 2.5 gigabit link ... for reads at least!
I've got 4 - 16 gigabyte drives in a zraid1 with 64 gigabytes of ram in what used to be an old gaming computer.
With my Steam collection on it games frequently max out my 10 gigabit connection when starting ... as long as the games are cached in ram and with that much ram most all my games are cached.
ZFS caches most recently used (MRU) and most frequently used (MFU) data to ram so that next time it can be served from ram instead of from disk.
My 10 gigabit switch
"More than just games are stored on the nas lol"

 

[Pierce2623]

90TB of spinning rust $1600 vs 90TB of SSD $9900, but sure it's dead.

If NAND could get down to double the cost it probably would be, but we're still nowhere near that.

Well it’s gotten to the point that even in server less than 15% of new systems use HDD. There will always be special use cases where the extra non-volatility will be useful but HDDs ARE dead. Even HAMR isn’t new technology. It just took a long time to get it cheap enough to be commercially viable.

 

[thestryker]

Well it’s gotten to the point that even in server less than 15% of new systems use HDD.

Source for that figure?

There will always be special use cases where the extra non-volatility will be useful but HDDs ARE dead. Even HAMR isn’t new technology. It just took a long time to get it cheap enough to be commercially viable.

By capacity the amount of HDD based storage being sold keeps going up on a quarter by quarter basis because there's no indication NAND can compete for nearline. That's a mostly cost oriented segment while NAND cost is significantly higher and enterprise SSDs tend to have poor idle power consumption.

You can keep saying HDDs are dead, but that absolutely doesn't make it true. They don't serve every market anymore and will never return to those lost, but until NAND is cheaper than it is now they're not going anywhere.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

Well it’s gotten to the point that even in server less than 15% of new systems use HDD. There will always be special use cases where the extra non-volatility will be useful but HDDs ARE dead. Even HAMR isn’t new technology. It just took a long time to get it cheap enough to be commercially viable.

I think we're comparing apples and oranges?

No one wants their boot/root drive to be HDD. No argument there.

No one wants their databases on an HDD. No argument there.

But when it comes to massive and/or long term storage, SSDs don't hold a candle to HDDs, for many reasons.

 

[Ogotai]

Spinning rust is dead.

yea right... for mass storage.. no, its not.. 4 tb hdd, 99 bucks.. that same 99 bucks, gets you a 1 tb m.2 drive...

or an OS drive, or games drive.. yes... else where.. not really.. unless the prices for ssds drops like a rock...

 

[Thunder64]

Except that it is. It took them decades to bring HAMR to market but now it's too late. HDD prices have been going up, SSD prices have been going down. HDD capacities and speeds have stagnated, SSD capacities and speeds have grown exponentially. HDDs are designed to fail reliably after 5 years, SSDs can operate indefinitely depending on write rate.

Simply not true. I have had an SSD die long before it should have. I also am still running a hard drive that is probably 10 years old with about 4.5 years of power on hours and 17,682 power on count. I don't trust it but that's what backups are for. And you know what is great for backups? Low cost HDD's.

 

[TheOtherOne]

Finally, I will be able to ditch minimum 6 SATA ports Motherboards! Two of these should cover all of my current SATA HDDs combined size. 👌🥳

 

[TheOtherOne]

HDDs are designed to fail reliably after 5 years, SSDs can operate indefinitely depending on write rate.

Do you have the facts to back that statement up?

On a personal experience, I have HDDs that are over 10/12 years old and still functioning fine without any single error.

On the other hand, I have already replaced THREE SSDs, all from the market leader Samsung. Two simply stopped working (dead within three months of purchase) and one recently started overheating despite working just fine plugged in the same system for about six months. Since it was still under warranty, I decided to replace it.

News of M.2 SSDs (specially from Samsung) dying out very often even after they keep releasing new firmware every few months to "fix" the issues, are everywhere.

 

[kyzarvs]

HDDs are designed to fail reliably after 5 years, SSDs can operate indefinitely depending on write rate.

Say what now?

I own a small IT firm, so we have a snapshot that's larger than the home user, but not that big I freely admit. Looking through our RMM platform, we have 74 laptops under cover with us that are still on spinners. The youngest drive is 6 years old and none have SMART errors (or we'd be in touch with the users to get a replacement organised).

We have our oldest NAS that is running 4x WD Red NAS drives. They are approaching a decade of UPTIME - not age, but actual spin time. We only have it as a spare now due to age, but they are still active.

Endurance on HDD's is much better than SSD's in our experience - especially if they are in laptops that allow them to get too hot regularly.

 

[leclod]

I bet all people, who say spinning rust is dead, have data stored on spinning rust somewhere.
(and I've never seen a rusty HDD)

 

[leclod]

Endurance on HDD's is much better than SSD's in our experience

I'm surprised about that statement. HDDs are fickle High Tech devices and Laptop users aren't very careful.
I always wondered about HDD life expectancy in a laptop. I know about some emergency head parking feature when dropped but still...

 

[rikster00]

Are these HDD's a "myth" still ? I've been looking around for a year and can't find anyone that is selling these.

 

[spongiemaster]

Well it’s gotten to the point that even in server less than 15% of new systems use HDD. There will always be special use cases where the extra non-volatility will be useful but HDDs ARE dead. Even HAMR isn’t new technology. It just took a long time to get it cheap enough to be commercially viable.

Not sure you could be more wrong. Western Digital just exited the SSD market to focus on spinning rust. That's how dead the hard drive market is.

In a blog post released a few weeks ago, WD's CEO Irving Tan claimed that HDD shipments are expected to see an uptrend due to the demand from the market, and that is where the firm will concentrate on moving into the future. So, it is safe to say that Western Digital won't be in the SSD markets, at least until the AI hype lasts.

 

[spongiemaster]

Are these HDD's a "myth" still ? I've been looking around for a year and can't find anyone that is selling these.

Hyperscalers are buying them all. The market demand for high capacity hard drives is extremely strong right now, despite the uninformed claims to the contrary from some here. You can easily buy recertified 28TB Exos on Amazon, despite them never being available as new.

 

[thestryker]

Not sure you could be more wrong. Western Digital just exited the SSD market to focus on spinning rust. That's how dead the hard drive market is.

You're 100% right about the HDD market being in a good place, but WD didn't leave the SSD market they just shifted it over to SanDisk.

You can easily buy recertified 28TB Exos on Amazon, despite them never being available as new.

I've not seen any of the Mosaic 3+ drives (30-36TB) for sale used/recert yet, but this is absolutely the market they will first appear in.

 

[spongiemaster]

You're 100% right about the HDD market being in a good place, but WD didn't leave the SSD market they just shifted it over to SanDisk.

I've not seen any of the Mosaic 3+ drives (30-36TB) for sale used/recert yet, but this is absolutely the market they will first appear in.

If WD didn't believe in the hard drive market they wouldn't be removing SSD's from the main brand. That tells you all you need to know about where the market is.

28TB Exos were announced in 2023 and the recerts just starting hitting the market a couple months ago. It will take time for the volume to build up on recerts for the Mosaic 3+ drives. There's realistically no market for drives this large outside of datacenters/cloud services and the like so who knows when or if we'll see new drives hit the market. The Mach.2 drives never made it to retail.