Recently, WD announced its plans for large capacity drives and demonstrated the technology to manufacture drives with up to 50TB capacities. Seagate seems to be the second company to join the high-capacity bandwagon as the company already has started prepping 22TB hard drives for the retail market.
While WD will be using conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and storage enhancement techniques like Ultra SMR to hit the 22TB and 26TB marks, Seagate will reportedly use Hybrid Shingled Magnetic Recording (HSMR) for the same. The company has already been testing their HSMR-powered 22TB hard drives with select customers, however, they might not bring these drives to the mass market.
Several SSDs are listed in the SATA-IO integrator’s list where it undergoes interoperability testing. The Seagate Osprey STL022 drives have recently been listed on the SATA-IO integrators list. Thus, we can confirm that these HDDs have successfully passed the SATA interoperability testing. Although the leaks did not specify a capacity, judging from the fact the Seagate Exos 20TB STL020 drive has a 20TB capacity, these new drives will probably come with 22TB of storage.
Seagate’s Exos X22 platform will offer capacities of up to 22TB. The company has already launched drives of up to 20TB capacities. Earlier this year, they also acknowledged the development of drives with over 20TB capacities. Thus, a 22TB Seagate drive might be around the corner. But, the Exos platform is based on conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology and not HSMR. Also, from Seagate’s recent movements, the company does not seem to introduce Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to any of their upcoming offerings.
Hardware ends up in the SATA-IO integrators list months before they are made publicly available. And, we have no idea how far into the testing Seagate’s hard drives are. Therefore, the release window can be anywhere between Q3 2022 to the end of the next year.
