The seemingly inevitable migration of consumer devices to solid-state drives does not cancel the trend of increasing demand for classic high-capacity hard drives in the AI segment. Seagate, in line with this trend, is preparing to increase the capacity of hard drives to 100 TB by 2030.
Image source: Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology launched its Exos M family of 36TB hard drives in January, so it’s nominally on track to triple that capacity by the end of the decade, Ban-Seng Teh, the company’s chief commercial officer, told CNBC. Many of Seagate’s customers, he said, are looking for drives of that size. There’s no other storage technology on the market that can deliver the capacity that the industry is growing, he said.
The expansion of data centers fueled by the AI boom is increasing their energy consumption, but Seagate is trying to curb that growth by offering drives with higher areal densities. The company is also focusing on using renewable energy in the production of its hard drives. Eventually, Seagate wants to power all of its facilities with renewable energy.
Seagate develops its drives with the need to reduce specific energy consumption per terabyte of data in mind. By integrating more capacious drives into data centers, the companies that operate them save space and energy without compromising the need for data storage capacity. According to a Seagate representative, solid-state drives are inferior to classic hard drives in terms of the negative impact on the environment during production and operation.