Toshiba is firing a shot across the bows of both Seagate and Western Digital by declaring it has hard drives in its labs that are currently beyond 30TB thanks to the application of next-generation storage technologies. The company is currently working on hard drives with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), which it says will meet the growing needs of data centers and cloud providers when they arrive soon.
Toshiba states it has already demonstrated hard drives with capacities of 32TB with HAMR and 31TB with MAMR. The 32TB drive uses 10 disks with a capacity of 3.2TB per platter, which it says will be ready for sampling next year. That likely means they'll hit the enterprise market in 2026 and hopefully trickle down to consumers sometime after that. The 31TB drive uses 11 platters, which is the first time we can recall a single drive having more than 10 disks. Toshiba says both drives also use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and improved signal processing to achieve these capacities.
From what we can surmise, Toshiba's cloud-scale enterprise drives currently top out at 22TB with the MG10F series, which uses a conventional 10-disk structure with conventional magnetic recording (CMR), and they're helium-sealed to boost density. However, all disk manufacturers seem to concur that CMR is no longer viable for further boosting area density; thus, we have a race to get HAMR drives to the market. This technology has been in the works for over a decade, and Seagate appears to be in the lead right now as it's shipping drives to some of its customers. Last year, Seagate announced it had finally shipped enough 32TB of HAMR drives to generate revenue for the first time.
We're still waiting to see if these 30+TB drives will ever arrive for consumers, as the initial drives are all targeting cloud providers whose storage demands will only increase over time. Seagate and Western Digital are in the hunt for the first company to ship a 30TB consumer drive, though, with Seagate announcing it was beginning to ramp 30TB HAMR drives in January. WD is already selling 28TB SMR drives as well, and according to Anandtech, soon it is expected to start talking about its HAMR drives, which could be around 36TB or so.