If you want to have bragging rights with your PC gaming or hardware friends over who has the biggest hard drive, you might soon be able to achieve that, thanks to a new announcement from Seagate. The company has just announced a new hard drive platform it calls Mozaic 3+. In short, Seagate says the platform incorporates a number of improvements in technology that will allow for 30TB hard drives to be made.
Seagate"s press release says that the new Mozaic 3+ platform will be used in the company"s lineup of Exos hard drives. While these products will launch first for "hyperscale cloud customers" later in the first quarter of 2024, TechRadar reports that, according to the company"s COO BS Teh, the 30TB versions will eventually be sold to the public. The drives also won"t need any specialist hardware to be used, which, in theory, means you can simply put in one of these 30TB drives in your PC, and it should just work.
Seagate claims it was able to reach this new hard drive capacity record by incorporating a bunch of new technologies. One of them is the use of what the company says is a "pioneering iron-platinum superlattice structure, which significantly increases the magnetic coercivity of disk media." It also uses a "nanophotonic laser, which produces an infinitesimal heat spot on the media surface to reliably write the data."
Seagate adds that Mozaic 3+ uses the "world"s smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors" to read the data on the hard drive disks. It also features a new 12nm integrated controller that the company claims will offer "up to 3 times the performance compared to prior solution."
All of this means that the new Exos 30TB hard drive has 10 platters inside that store 3TB of data each. However, Seagate claims that in the future, more advanced versions of the Mozaic platform could increase the data platter storage size to 4TB or even 5TB.
Interestingly, the cost per terabyte will actually be cheaper compared to other models. The new Exos drives use a lot of Seagate"s existing technology, which should make these drives more affordable.
While Seagate has yet to reveal a price point on these new Mozaic 3+ Exos drives, TechRadar estimates that they could be priced as low as $450 when they go on sale to end users (assuming a $15 per terabyte cost). Hopefully, we won"t have to wait that long to get these huge drives in our PCs.