Seagate achieves 6.9TB storage capacity per platter
30 comments
·November 27, 2025jtokoph
Yokolos
Probably no different than current drives? Who would pay more for worse drives? Particularly in enterprise, where defect rates and error rates make a much bigger difference and quickly add up across such a large number of drives.
cookiengineer
> Probably no different than current drives? Who would pay more for worse drives? Particularly in enterprise, where defect rates and error rates make a much bigger difference and quickly add up across such a large number of drives.
Western Digital would like to have a word about shingled magnetic recording drives.
gruez
SMR drives aren't worse in any of those metrics except random writes. Yes, people running NAS with them got screwed over, but for your typical use case of storing movies they're fine.
anonymars
Ha, the ones they mixed in with conventional drives, while still giving them the same model names and numbers? That was a good time, thanks WD
Neywiny
> Seagate is leveraging its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology to deliver its 6.9TB platter. If you want to check out how Seagate's HAMR technology works, check out our previous coverage. In a nutshell, HAMR uses heat-induced magnetic coercivity to write to a hard drive platter.
Wow so heat assisted magnetic recording is using heat to magnetically record data. Incredible explanation.
wmf
Yeah, don't try to learn science from Tom's Hardware.
9cb14c1ec0
When we are getting the DNA storage we'll all been promised?
geor9e
send them your 750 bytes in ATCG format https://www.genscript.com/gene-fragments.html
almosthere
I just bought a 2tb SSD drive that's the size of a tictac container...
Octoth0rpe
Sure. And you paid, what, maybe $120? so, $60/tb. When seagate commercializes these, it'll be around $10/tb. My last seagate spinning disks for my nas were 20tb for $150.
SSDs have a valuable place in the world, but so do spinning disks. Physical size isn't a concern for my nas (I mean, assuming we're talking < 300cm^3 for the whole setup..), but $/tb is.
commandar
Spinning rust still typically holds advantages for archival storage, as well.
There was literally a headline on the front page here a few days ago re: data degradation of SSDs during cold storage, as one example.
saltcured
I missed that earlier post to ask a question that always bugs me... do SSDs, when powered on, actually "patrol" their storage and rewrite cells that are fading even when quiescent from the host perspective?
Or does the data decay there as well, just as a function of time since cells were written?
In other words, is this whole focus on "powered off" just a proxy for "written once" versus "live data with presumed turnover"? Or do the cells really age more rapidly without power?
threeducks
The article in question: "Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038099
Razengan
> Data degradation of SSDs during cold storage
Why is that? I'd have expected solid-state electronics to last longer at low temperatures.
Or is it precisely that, some near/superconductivity effects causing naughty electrons to escape and wander about?
api
“Disk is the new tape” has been true for a while and will probably stay true.
SSD also has longer term data loss issues when unpowered. Magnetic disk is still better in that respect too.
immibis
Tape is still half the cost per TB, but you have to be storing at least several hundred TBs to break even with the cost of a single tape drive. For two it's certainly well over a petabyte.
wmf
Flash is far denser than hard disks but as long as it's more expensive it's not that relevant.
1970-01-01
>7TB to 15TB platters available from 2031 onward
Isn't 0.1TB a little too low? I'm sure if they only improved this little in 5 years the company would be in big trouble.
martinpw
From the article:
these 6.9TB platters are still in development and are not planned to be used for another 5 years.
cwalkatron
nice
Razengan
The perfect number.
The ideal has been achieved. We need go no further.
typcalredditusr
[dead]
I wonder what the lifespan, error rate and speed of these drives are