Seagate Delivers Industry’s Highest Capacity Hard Drives with Next-Generation Mozaic 4+
Industry's only HAMR-based platform supports economic viability of AI-scale data growth
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 24, 2026 at 2:02 pmAs technology innovation accelerates both data creation and value, the need for scalable, efficient, high-performance storage solutions has never been greater.
Seagate Technology announced its next-generation Mozaic 4+ platform, the industry’s only heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)-based storage platform deployed at-scale, is now qualified and in production with two leading hyperscale cloud providers. Supporting capacities up to 44TB, these qualifications reflect production-scale deployments in hyperscale environments.
With additional customer qualifications under way, Seagate is delivering on its roadmap to scale from today’s 4+TB per-disk toward a future 10TB per-disk – enabling hard drive capacities of up to 100TB. The platform incorporates a next-gen suspension architecture and an enhanced system-on-a-chip that enables precise recording at higher densities while maintaining enterprise reliability. Each platform gen allows continued gains in capacity without requiring disruptive architectural shifts.
“Data has become one of the most valuable assets for enterprises, fueling business insights, enhancing productivity, and enabling competitive advantage. As the foundation of modern data center infrastructure, data storage solutions are essential to manage ever-increasing data volumes and maximize returns on investments in today’s AI driven-world,” said Dave Mosley, chair and CEO, Seagate. “Seagate’s HAMR-based Mozaic products deliver the scale, performance, and efficiency customers need to unlock the of their data.”
With a majority of the world’s largest cloud storage providers already qualified on Seagate’s Mozaic platform, this milestone underscores the platform’s critical role in data center infrastructure.
Production‑Scale HAMR with Vertically Integrated Photonics
Seagate’s custom-designed and manufactured laser technology reflects years of investment in nanophotonic engineering of critical components used in HAMR recording. This vertically integrated, in-house innovation strengthens both design and control over yield, reliability and supply chain resilience, all of which are essential as unprecedented growth in data pushes storage demand beyond historical levels. Vertical integration also shortens qualification timelines and supports predictable manufacturing economics.
How Mozaic 4+ Addresses Data Center Infrastructure Challenges
Artificial Intelligence depends on the ability to retain and access massive volumes of training data, historical archives and AI-generated content – including increasingly large video and other multimodal outputs. Hyperscalers rely on mass-capacity hard drives to economically store, manage and reactivate the exponentially growing data pools that enable trustworthy AI workloads.
The incremental increases in per-disk capacity delivered by Mozaic 4+ enable high-capacity, cost-efficient storage that scales without increasing infrastructure footprint or energy consumption – strengthening the economic foundation of AI at scale. The platform advances capacity per-rack and per-watt, improving data center efficiency, lowering total cost of ownership and enabling organizations to preserve and reactivate data over time, sustainably.
In a one-EB deployment, Mozaic improves infrastructure efficiency by approximately 47% compared to standard 30TB deployments, reducing required data center footprint by about 100 square feet and lowering annual energy consumption by roughly 0.8 million kilowatt-hours. At AI scale, these efficiencies compound into meaningful economic advantage.
“As AI models have evolved and GenAI-powered applications have expanded their capabilities and reach, it’s become abundantly clear that the need for massive amounts of data-both real and synthetically generated-are essential to keep AI advancements moving ahead,” said Bob O’Donnell, president, TECHnalysis Research. “Whether for large-scale model training or sophisticated fine-tuning, companies who build and use these AI models have found that high-capacity hard drive innovations like HAMR have become critical to quality and speed of their outputs.”
Availability
Seagate’s Mozaic 4+ hard drives supporting capacities up to 44TB are now shipping in volume to two leading hyperscale cloud providers. Broader availability is planned as production continues to scale.
Comments
HDDs have been used for a wide range of purposes over many years and have long served as the foundation of enterprise storage. Many still recall laptops equipped with HDDs, as well as production environments relying on large farms of hard drives and high-end disk arrays.
However, the landscape has evolved. Today, most production workloads rely heavily on SSDs and flash-based storage.
As a result, the storage hierarchy has shifted once again, settling into a model where flash, HDD, and tape coexist - often complemented by cloud storage at any tier. It is important to distinguish between primary and secondary storage: primary storage is directly connected to production applications, where data is created and actively used, while secondary storage is responsible for protecting IT environments by storing backup, even archives, and protection data derived from the primary tier.
The HDD market is dominated by three manufacturers - Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba - who now sell the majority of their drives to hyperscalers. These customers primarily evaluate storage based on $/TB.
Faced with the rapid rise of flash, HDD vendors have responded with continuous innovation across multiple dimensions: recording heads, platters, areal density, capacity, energy efficiency, performance, reliability, and again, $/TB optimization. Technologies such as HAMR and platforms like Mozaic highlight recent breakthroughs, including multi-platter designs (e.g., 11 platters exceeding 4TB each) that aim to push capacities toward 100TB.
That said, HDDs have lost one of their historical advantages - capacity leadership. SSDs now reach up to 122TB, while HDDs are typically in the 32–36TB range, with 40–44TB on the horizon. SMR technology has provided incremental gains of around 10–20%. It is also worth noting that the NVMe 2.0 specification now includes support for HDDs.
Both HDD and SSD technologies will continue to scale in capacity, supported by strong roadmaps. However, their trajectories are diverging, with projections suggesting roughly a 1:10 ratio - around 100TB for HDDs versus up to 1PB for SSDs.
In parallel, some vendors have revisited energy-saving approaches, such as powering down idle disks. Historically known as MAID (Massive Array of Idle/Inexpensive Disks), this concept was explored by companies like Copan Systems, NEC, and Nexsan. More recently, similar ideas have resurfaced under initiatives modern disk archiving and cold storage with players like Disk Archive Corp. or Leil Storage with, including concepts such as zero-watt disks or spin-down storage. These approaches are gaining renewed interest, particularly in combination with HM-SMR HDDs.
Ultimately, HDDs continue to play a critical role in the storage ecosystem, despite an apparent paradox: they are increasingly used for secondary storage - the largest capacity tier - yet they are no longer the devices offering the highest individual capacities.
Subscribe to our free daily newsletter
