The spinning hard drive continues to live on as capacities push higher and higher. Each manufacturer pushes ahead of the other to deliver the largest capacity solution possible. All while keeping far under the price of an SSD. Now the next product in the spotlight is the Seagate 30TB Mozaic 3+ Exos Hard Drives that the company just announced.
With this model, Seagate uses an iron-platinum superlattice structure and a plasmonic writer to deliver up to 3TB per platter, leading up to this new capacity threshold. While looking ahead to deliver even larger capacities with up to 5TB per platter in the future as it grows this technology out. Guaranteeing that HDDs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
There is no price information or an exact release date just yet, but we do know that it will be launching this year and that window may be sooner than later. The target customer is enterprise through datacenters, but you should be able to get your hands on one regardless. Allowing anyone to take advantage of these new capacities. Likely, it will probably fall between $450 and $500 at first (but that’s just a guess).
For the moment, Seagate only talks about the technology behind the drive with an option to reach out to them with interest. So there is no way of knowing just yet if it will be available via retailers (like Seagate’s store on Amazon).
The only thing we wonder about is the speed of the drive, how it will compare to current popular modern options, and how it will affect the prices of other drives in the market. Over time, as capacities grow, prices typically begin to fall for previous models. But the market has slowed greatly in recent years, stagnating that pattern for a bit. Likely due to the fact we have reached a level of capacity that isn’t exactly in demand by the average consumer.
However, with additional capacities above 20TB entering the market, we are bound to see some fluctuations. We may even see 8TB finally become the new 4TB when it comes to average pricing and demand. It’s unlikely but it never hurts to stay positive and shed hope on what’s to come.
