Seagate’s 30TB hard drive, utilising heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, is currently the largest mechanical drive, primarily aimed at large data centres. However, for regular consumers, 22TB drives are the biggest purchasable models. Meanwhile, SSDs have already surpassed HDDs with a 100TB model, and with further advancements, they’re poised to lead in storage capacity, despite higher per-GB costs.
“Spinning rust” mechanical hard drives may not have speed to offer anymore, but they still rule the roost when it comes to pure storage capacity—for now. So how big can you go when buying a mechanical hard drive today?
The Biggest Mechanical Hard Drives
In a significant leap for data storage technology, Seagate announced the shipment of its 30TB hard drives in April 2023. This new drive, using the company’s advanced heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, currently holds the title for the largest mechanical hard drive available on the market. Well, we say available, but we couldn’t actually find any example that could be bought through regular retailers. These are all likely to be sold directly to large data centers.
This accomplishment was no small feat, involving meticulous balancing of factors such as physical space, speed, heat, and reliability. However, the successful implementation of HAMR technology has opened up the potential for mechanical hard drives to continue growing.
As for the biggest drive you can order right now as of this writing? That’s probably something like the Western Digital 22TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive. Which, while pretty expensive, is not as expensive as we were expecting. Catch the 22TB Red Pro on sale and your cost per TB dips well below what you’d pay purchasing a smaller drive from the same WD Red lineup.
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Can Hard Drives Get Any Bigger?
The people who make mechanical hard drives seem to think there’s still plenty of room for growth. When Seagate was telling the world about its HAMR technology, this future roadmap formed part of the discussion.
The company believes that mechanical hard drives in excess of 50TB will be here by 2026, with a roadmap stretching all the way to 120TB using “bit patterned” media to achieve 8TB per square inch of platter surface.
Far from being on the way out, it seems the future if mechanical hard drives might be bigger and brighter than ever. Most people likely won’t be installing 120TB drives in their home computer, but everyone will certainly benefit from their use in data centers.
When Will SSDs Reach These Sizes?
What about SSDs? The answer is that they’ve already blasted way past that paltry 30TB mark, with the Nimbus ExaDrive DC available in a whopping 100TB variant. New NAND flash manufacturing technology means that 200TB drives are around the corner as well, with 400TB drives on the horizon as soon as 2023, though we wouldn’t bet real money on that! Speaking of real money, if you want to get your hands on one of these ultra-high-capacity SSDs you’ll need a lot of it—the cost-per-TB price for SSDs in this range is hundreds of dollars.
Because flash memory is a silicon semiconductor product, you can see the same sort of exponential gains that are part of microprocessor history. Gaining more capacity is (broadly speaking) just a matter of stuffing more NAND chips into a drive, at least up to a point. So as the chips themselves become more memory-dense and drive controller technology gets better, it looks like SSD storage will outpace HDDs not only in speed but in pure capacity.
That doesn’t mean HDDs don’t have things going for them to stay in the game. The per-GB cost of storage on SSDs will remain much higher than on these mechanical drives for the foreseeable future, and there are some operating conditions and data retention needs in data centers that SSDs aren’t the ideal solution for yet.
Of course, for regular consumers like us, the biggest SSDs you can order from the likes of Amazon are around 8TB in size, like this Corsair MP600 PRO XT 8TB Gen4 PCIe x4 NVMe. Which has just over a third of that 22GB WD drive’s capacity, but costs 2.5 times as much! Unless you need that much SSD storage for specialized applications, it makes sense to stick to using a more modestly sized SSD as your boot drive and mechanical drives for the rest of your storage needs.
