Seagate Technology will begin shipping samples of its Exos M hard drive from today (January 21).

Based on the company’s heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, Mozaic 3+, the hard drives have a capacity of up to 36TB, supporting 10 platters each with a 3.6TB capacity.

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Seagate Exos M 36TB – Seagate

The Mozaic HAMR technology uses a medium that can be magnetized in much smaller domains than conventional vertical recording media, but which has to be heated to become writable. This means that Seagate has had to develop HDD read-write heads with tiny lasers that can heat the platter precisely where bits are to be written.

In a statement, Seagate said its Exos M offering provides data center operators with “significant scale, total cost of ownership, and sustainability advantages,” including 300 percent more storage capacity within the same data center footprint and a 60 percent reduction in power consumption per terabyte.

The company also claims that Exos M provides a 25 percent cost reduction per terabyte. These figures relate to comparisons between a 10TB to 30TB capacity upgrade, when comparing Exos X10 to Exos M 30TB Mozaic hard drive.

“We’re in the midst of a seismic shift in the way data is stored and managed,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate CEO. “Unprecedented levels of data creation – due to continued cloud expansion and early AI adoption – demand long-term data retention and access to ensure trustworthy data-driven outcomes.”

Mosley added: “As the world’s leading producer of exabytes, and the only manufacturer capable of manufacturing 3.6TB per platter hard drives at scale, Seagate is laser-focused on delivering the storage scale required for the applications of the future.”

Seagate said its innovation roadmap includes a pathway to increasing per-platter capacity to 10TB.