Seagate Just Unleashed 44TB Hard Drives (nerds.xyz)
- Reference: 0180922682
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/07/0649230/seagate-just-unleashed-44tb-hard-drives
- Source link: https://nerds.xyz/2026/03/seagate-mozaic-4-plus-44tb-hamr-hard-drives/
"The [3]company claims the platform is the only heat-assisted magnetic recording [HAMR] implementation currently operating at scale, and it is targeting a path from today's 4+TB per disk toward 10TB per disk, eventually enabling 100TB-class drives."
> In a one-exabyte deployment, Seagate estimates Mozaic could improve infrastructure efficiency by roughly 47% compared to standard 30TB drives, cutting both footprint and energy consumption... HAMR uses a tiny laser to heat the disk surface during writes, allowing higher recording density without sacrificing stability. With most major cloud storage providers reportedly qualified on the Mozaic platform, Seagate is positioning spinning disks, not flash, as the long-term answer for cost-effective AI-scale data growth.
[1] https://nerds.xyz/2026/03/seagate-mozaic-4-plus-44tb-hamr-hard-drives/
[2] https://www.slashdot.org/~BrianFagioli
[3] https://www.seagate.com/stories/articles/seagate-delivers-industrys-highest-capacity-hard-drives-with-next-generation-mozaic-4/
Does Seagate still suck? (Score:3)
I remember 20 years ago Seagate drives were the ones to avoid. I have never bought anything besides WD. Has that changed?
Re: Does Seagate still suck? (Score:5, Informative)
Seagate is still pretty crap
Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
At this point I think it depends on the individual drive mechanism, even from the same manufacturer. The best data source for this stuff is Backblaze, whom unfortunately only covers enterprise class drives. There is even quite a bit of variation across different manufacturing runs of the same drive.
[1]https://www.backblaze.com/blog... [backblaze.com]
One run of Seagate 12TB drives has a 2.7% failure rate, which is mediocre, while a different run of the same drive is at 0.9%, which is pretty good. HGST used to be great, but now their numbers are mostly well north of 1%. WDC looks pretty good, except for one drive at 2.6%,
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2025/
Re: (Score:2)
If you care about your data, you need to have backups and corruption detection.
More about individual drives, not the brand (Score:1)
> I remember 20 years ago Seagate drives were the ones to avoid. I have never bought anything besides WD. Has that changed?
Things are "the same" but it's not really about brands. It's about individual drive families. Every manufacturer has good and bad drive families. You can't just make an assumption based on brand.
I've usually bought WD, but it's based on the track record of the drive family. Similar with the occasional Seagate. I've had pretty good luck with such "researched" drives.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes it comes down to drive families. For example, WD Red were for NAS drives; however, the cheapest WD Red drives in 2021 quietly switched to SMR instead of CMR which had huge performance problems in RAID configurations. WD had to distinguish between WD Red (SMR) with WD Red Plus or Pro (CMR) as part of class action lawsuits. Frankly the only use case I can think of using SMR for NAS is single drive NAS machines.
Re: (Score:1)
> Frankly the only use case I can think of using SMR for NAS is single drive NAS machines.
RAID 1 mirroring in a 2 drive consumer oriented NAS?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe not mirroring. Maybe striping. The issue was syncing across drives as SMR drives caches the files in a temporary area before overlapping sectors are saved. Striping would not be affected by striping as much; however, the caching part might be problematic depending on where the files exist.
Re: (Score:2)
Well seeing as there simply won't be any WD drives in the consumer market this year, I guess beggars can't be choosers.
Re: (Score:2)
For the consumer models, Seagate has slightly worse reliability than WD. For enterprise models, they seem about even. However for the price of enterprise HDDs, the customer should expect longer warranties and impeccable customer service.
Hope this comes to consumers. (Score:1)
While 44TB seems inordinately excessive for any purpose outside running Earth-destroying AI clanker slop upon first glance, I can definitely see this being useful. I'm something of a data hoarder, so the idea of having 44TB or more available to me sounds heavenly. It'd be especially nice if it manages to be reasonably affordable.
I would love to be able to go to an online store and buy such a huge HDD for a good price. I would just die of happiness if I were able to buy some 100TB drives for $1000 or less. U
Re: Hope this comes to consumers. (Score:2)
I'm not sure I'd want to trust a single drive with all of my hoarded data.
Defense in depth (Score:1)
> I'm not sure I'd want to trust a single drive with all of my hoarded data.
I wouldn't want my hoard (or backups) on a single anything. Defense in depth.
The PC has M2 SSD for normal Window and Linux use, but also a big HD for backups and the hoard.
Then there is a NAS.
Then there are external drives in a full size powered USB enclosure. Backups of PCs and NAS.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't believe ya'll data is worth ALL that, but I really love the nerdiness of having a better backup regime then most corporations. Today, we salute you, hoarder of all that is digital.
Re: (Score:2)
I definitely hope so, because smaller companies will only be able to buy it if it is available to consumers. And the small company I work for definitely needs drives as large as possible to be put into a RAID for our massive video and picture servers.
RAID required (Score:2)
The bigger they get the scarier it is to rely on them. Impressive how far we've come density wise but have to buy two at the minimum.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course, but that's true for any kind of mass storage, also SSDs. Also hard disks become progressively more expensive per Terabyte as they get to the extreme sizes, you kinda need multiple drives to get any meaningful amount of storage. 44 Terabyte is not _that_ much these days, particularly when doing archival work.
, Bigger is better (Score:2)
Bigger is always better for the enterprises that need that kind of storage (and the hyperscalers wish even larger capacity, delivered yesterday if possible).
Where's the other wonder storages? (Score:2)
Fascinating how magnetic hard drives keeps improving significantly over decades, while none of the many new "wonder storage" devices delivered... where's that Petabyte duct-tape, the holographic crystals, the DNA storage?
Re: (Score:2)
They were seriously challenged by optical drives in the 80s and 90s for storage capacity, but kept on growing faster than optical could manage:
Year Magnetic HDD capacity Optical capacity
1956 3.75 MB —
1982 10–100 MB 650 MB (CD)
1995 1–2 GB 4.7 GB (DVD)
2006 100–500 GB 25–50 GB (Blu-ray)
2020s 20+ TB 100 GB (consumer Blu-ray)
Wow!!! (Score:2)
That's a lottttt of porn.
Modernized starlight/astro nav as a backup? (Score:2)
I wonder how small and cheap something like this could be built these days:
[1]https://theaviationgeekclub.co... [theaviationgeekclub.com]
Apparently some military aircraft have exactly this solution.
[1] https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-sr-71-blackbird-astro-nav-system-aka-r2-d2-worked-by-tracking-the-stars-and-was-so-powerful-that-it-could-see-the-stars-even-in-daylight/
Too little too late... (Score:2)
HDDs still have four massive problems that I doubt will be solved anytime soon.
1. Capacity. Seagate and other HDD manufacturers have a roadmap of reaching 100 TB by 2035. Meanwhile SSDs are heading for 4 000 TB by 2035. That is x40.
2. Space. Three HDDs can fit up to eight E3.L drives for the same space. And those has 250 TB capacities right now. That means you can fit roughly 2 PB of storage for the same space you can fit 132 TB today. That is 15 times more storage space for the same capacity.
3. Energy. Giv
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to be ignoring one small factor in your comparisons: price. If you have infinite money, then certainly SSD is the way to go. But most of us do not.
HD aren't dead yet (Score:1)
HD are not dead yet. I just built a DIY PC. 1TB M2 for Windows, 512GB M2 for Linux, 8TB WD Red HD for backups and auxiliary storage. Its more convenient and faster than a NAS, which I also have for things that actually might get shared between systems,
Re: (Score:3)
No, particularly for RAID as well as NAS/SNA storage, hard drives won't be replaced by SSD's simply due to costs, as well as the huge densities they support
Here here (Score:3)
I'm running a 5x ZFS+2 30TB FreeNAS array. All our desktops and laptops back up to it, and it stores all our ripped CDs that get streamed through Plex. The really important stuff has a secondary off-line backup (photos, tax stuff) as well. Total cost was around $1000 including a Dell server. Worth every penny if you don't want to loose all your stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
this is, as they say, the way
6 x 4TB Z2, in a scavenged proliant with 64GB ECC, one 16T WD gold in a separate normal box as a backup target, and that machine has backblaze so it's offsite unlimited for $100 / year
initial 4TB drives bought as a lot of used ebay drives and replaced as they become marginal, but it's been years now and i've only replaced 2 of them with new red pros so far
everything's ticking along nicely, only thing i really need to do is switch over to Scale at some point. insane value for bit
Re: (Score:3)
It's a question of cost really.
A 1TB NVME SSD is about $150.
A 1TB SATA SSD is about $100.
A 1TB HDD is about $40.
If you are mostly interesting in storage and not performance. HDD are hard to beat.