Seagate has started shipping the first 22TB HDDs

Seagate has begun shipping 22TB HDDs to select large customers. The company confirms this during the presentation of its quarterly figures. They are currently the highest capacity HDDs on the market.

Seagate confirms it is supplying 22TB HDDs to customers during a shareholder conference call, Tom’s Hardware noted. “Our strategy also provides manufacturing flexibility and improves our overall cost efficiency across the breadth of our common platform family, which currently includes 16TB to 20TB capacity for CMR products, with some customers expanding to 22TB with SMR feature sets,” said Seagate CEO Dave Mosley to shareholders.

The manufacturer thus indicates that it uses shingled magnetic recording, or smr, for the hard drives. In contrast to cmr, data tracks on the HDD platters are partly superimposed with shingled magnetic recording. That allows for higher storage capacities, although it can adversely affect arbitrary read and write speeds. The company does not share exact specifications of its 22TB HDDs.

The 22TB drives are not yet available to everyone; they are currently being supplied to some of Seagate’s major customers. The HDDs that are widely sold by manufacturers such as Seagate and WD currently go up to 20TB. Such 20TB drives are generally in the Pricewatch for more than 500 euros.

Seagate also indicates that it will continue to work on HDDs with heat-assisted magnetic recording, or hamr. The company says it is supplying hamr drives to select customers for evaluation. The company expects such drives to eventually become part of its common platform. Seagate reported last year that it expects to ship 50TB HDDs by 2026. By 2030, that capacity could potentially fall to 100TB HDDs.

A previous Seagate roadmap