Seagate Exos X24: The first 24TB hard drive to come with a 28TB option

Leading hard drive manufacturer Seagate is expanding its portfolio to 24TB of storage space. This is the amount of storage offered by the new Seagate Exos X24, intended for use in data centers. Cloud customers can optionally get 28TB, but with a technical drawback.

Just half a year after Seagate introduced its first 22TB hard drive, the company is now announcing its first 24TB hard drive. However, the Exos X24 must first be sampled by customers, and Seagate doesn’t expect widespread availability until December.

The Seagate Exos X24 is a 3.5-inch hard drive for server use that uses a conventional recording method (CMR) to store 24TB of data. However, some business customers should have the opportunity to increase storage capacity to 28TB using coated magnetic recording (SMR). However, this means overlapping data paths, which means that adjacent paths must also be updated when rewritten, which costs performance. Therefore, SMR hard drives are usually only used as archive storage with infrequent or even one-time writes.

Seagate will also continue to offer the configuration flexibility of the Exos

Seagate

With 24TB (CMR) and 28TB (SMR), Seagate is once again at the top of the storage capacity of traditional hard drives. Western Digital currently offers a maximum capacity of 26TB with SMR, but has also announced samples of a 28TB SMR hard drive.

The HAMR is finally scheduled for commercial launch in 2024

Next year, Seagate wants to make the new HAMR technology socially acceptable: more than 30TB could then be saved with the help of a tiny laser in the write head. Today Seagate says that “Production is scheduled to begin in early 2024However, because HAMR hard drives frequently delay, this information should be treated with caution.

Seagate Exos X24 specifications

Seagate once again relies on ten magnetic disks, each of which can now hold 2.4TB of data. These rotate at 7,200 rpm in a helium-filled, air-tight housing. Seagate limits the maximum throughput rate to 285 MB/s. SATA 6 Gb/s or SAS 12 Gb/s interfaces are available. More information can be found on the official product pages.