Seagate has shared an updated roadmap that outlines its plan to build its first 50TB hard drives. The company revealed the update during its financial results call for the fourth fiscal quarter, where it confirmed that the first 50TB drives are expected to be delivered to customers for validation in 2027.
The new drives will use Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, which remains the company’s main solution for increasing the storage capacity of mechanical hard drives.
Right now, Seagate’s Mozaic 4+ platform supports capacities of up to 44TB. The company’s short-term goal is for 50% of all HAMR exabytes sold by the end of the year to come from this platform.
Seagate Plans 50TB HAMR Hard Drives for 2027
The next step will be Mozaic 5+, the third generation of the architecture. It is designed to store more than 5TB per disk platter. Since Seagate’s flagship drives use 10 platters, this design will make it possible to reach 50TB of storage. The first Mozaic 5+ samples are expected to be sent to data centers and hardware makers for testing during 2027.
Looking further ahead, Seagate’s development team has already tested prototype platters with storage densities of nearly 6.9TB per platter. The long-term goal is to reach 8TB per platter.
By 2028, the company hopes to demonstrate 10TB per platter, which would make hard drives with capacities close to 100TB possible. Seagate’s roadmap also points to drives with 50TB to 60TB by 2030, while models with more than 80TB are expected between 2031 and 2032.
These plans show that hard drives are still expected to play an important role, especially in servers and large data centers, where they remain the most affordable way to store massive amounts of data.
