Seagate's 30TB Exos Hard Drive Writes Large
EE Journal, Tuesday, March 26th, 2024
Thirty Terabytes. These two words don't ordinarily go together to describe the capacity of a hard drive, but Seagate has just introduced a 3 1/2-inch hard drive family - called the Exos Mozaic 3+ - with a maximum capacity of 30 Tbytes.
These drives store more than 3 Tbytes per platter. Contrast this 30Tbyte drive with my first hard drive, a Seagate ST-225, which I bought in 1985 for a home-built IBM PC clone. The ST-225 was a half-height, 5 1/4-inch, 20Mbyte hard drive with an MFM interface. It required an external hard-drive controller board. At 30Tbytes, the largest Exos Mozaic 3+ drive has more than six orders of magnitude more storage capacity than my original ST-225, bought nearly 40 years ago, as shown in the figure below. That's a huge capacity increase and an achievement that easily rivals Moore's Law scaling in semiconductors.