Anyone who has tried to find the best hard drives at massive sizes has likely come across the Seagate's Exos range, which can go up to 32TB (yes, you read that right).
Announced back in January 2024, the Seagate Exos Mozaic 3+ is one of the largest hard drives money can buy, and the beauty of it is that anyone can use the Exos series with their own machine. These aren't just designed for hyperscale data center operators and the like.
Building a 32TB hard drive isn't easy, and Seagate had to leverage a lot of new technologies to get there, especially for a reasonable price point. The most notable is using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), which allows hard disk tracks to overlap, creating a hard drive with higher densities.
Most hard drives use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR), which has been the standard for a number of years, but the tech simply would not be able to create a 32TB hard drive that wasn't massive.
Seagate used 3TB platter, with an areal density of 1.742 Tb per square inch, and makes use of SMR or, for hyperscale customers, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The precious record was Western Digital Gold, which hit 24TB.
Watch out for refurb Exos
But beware: we've recently noticed hundreds of refurbished Seagate 28TB SMR hard disk drives that have surfaced online at pretty unbelievable prices. While this might sound good in principle, the problem is that a refurbished product has very likely been sent back by its owners, and therefore has a fault.
Seagate launched the Exos range in early 2024, and so there has been enough time for customers to make orders, find a fault, and send the super high-end hard drives back to the manufacturer.
Finding reliable figures for how much the Exos range costs new is difficult, but the refurbished model costing €549.99 for 28TB of storage is likely to be extremely cheap in comparison.
What is the best massive hard drive?
TechRadar has spent plenty of hours testing the largest SSD and hard drives on the market right now, and we found that the ExaDrive EDDCT100/EDDCS100 tops the list, with an incredible 100TB of storage on offer, as well as options on the more modest end of the spectrum.
It's worth also shouting out the Samsung T5 EVO, which can come with up to 8TB of storage, for a pretty reasonable $450, too. The WD Elements 6TB portable HDD could also be worth checking out.
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