If you’re looking to store more of your surveillance camera footage or simply keep all your corporate data to crunch with AI later, then you’d be happy to hear that Seagate has come up with the industry’s first 32TB hard drives using conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology.
Launched last week, the large-capacity drives are aimed at businesses or professional users seeking a whole lot of storage as well as performance and reliability for their commercial data.
Seagate is offering the 32TB capacity – the largest in its class – in its SkyHawk AI, Exos and IronWolf Pro ranges of drives. SkyHawk AI is made for AI-enabled video surveillance, while Exos is for demanding datacentre setups and IronWolf Pro drives typically end up in network attached storage (NAS) devices.
Rival hard disk maker Western Digital had already come up with large 32TB drives last year but it made use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, which is not as well suited for demanding scenarios, such as 24/7 video recording or network storage.
For its latest 32TB drives, Seagate has bumped up the capacity by utilising new heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. In a nutshell, this uses a laser to heat up tiny portions of a disk to write data on it, thus enabling more data to be squeezed in a disk of the same size.
Of course, these 32TB drives won’t come cheap. Their sticker prices are US$699.99 for the SkyHaw AI, US$729.99 for the Exos and US$849.99 for the IronWolf Pro.
However, if you’re thinking of buying them for your home or small office NAS or surveillance system, be prepared to compete with large AI cloud datacentre players that have recently looked to hard disks for storage after finding it hard to buy faster solid state drives (SSDs).
That means prices surging past the suggested retail prices. A quick check on Singapore retailer Lazada shows that the 32TB Seagate IronWolf Pro is going for a hefty S$1,380 or US$1,075. That’s quite a bit higher than the suggested US$849.99.
