Destination 30 TB: HDD Vendors Plan Different Routes to Hit Storage Milestone in 2023

In the recent months all three hard drive manufacturers - Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital - and some of their partners have outlined plans to ship 30TB HDDs already in 2023 ~ 2024 timeframe. Apparently, all of these companies plan to use different technologies to get to this milestone.

Demand for high capacity nearline hard drives has been increasing for years and is not going to stop, as more data is generated each and every day. But nearline HDD users not only want their drives in large quantities, but they want a rapid increase in capacity as well, in a bid to keep the number of drives (and therefore the number of servers and power consumption of datacenters) in check. But capacity increases have been slowing down in the recent years, mainly because of slow roll out of energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies.