Anyone who's tried to find the best hard drives in huge sizes has probably come across Seagate's Exos range, which can go up to 32TB (yes, you read that right).
Announced in January 2024, the Seagate Exos Mozaic 3+ is one of the largest hard drives money can buy, and the cool thing is that anyone can use the Exos series with their own machine. These are not just designed for operators of hyperscale data centers and the like.
Building a 32TB hard drive isn't easy, and Seagate had to leverage a lot of new technology to get there, especially for a reasonable price. The most notable is the use of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), which allows hard drive tracks to overlap, creating a hard drive with higher densities.
Most hard drives use conventional magnetic recording (CMR), which has been the standard for several years, but the technology simply couldn't create a 32TB hard drive that wasn't huge.
Seagate used a 3TB platter, with an areal density of 1.742Tb per square inch, and uses SMR or, for hyperscale users, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The most precious record was Western Digital Gold, which reached 24 TB.
Beware of the renewed Exos
But be careful: we've recently noticed hundreds of refurbished Seagate SMR 28TB hard drives appearing online at some pretty incredible prices. Although this may seem good in principle, the problem is that it is very likely that a refurbished product has been returned by its owners and, therefore, has a fault.
Seagate launched the Exos range in early 2024, so there has been enough time for customers to place orders, find a fault and send the high-end hard drives to the manufacturer.
It's hard to find reliable figures on how much the Exos range costs new, but the refurbished model costing €549.99 for 28TB of storage is probably extremely cheap by comparison.
What is the best massive hard drive?
TechRadar has spent many hours testing the largest hard drives and SSDs on the market right now, and we found that the ExaDrive EDDCT100/EDDCS100 tops the list, offering an incredible 100TB of storage, as well as options on the more modest end. of the spectrum.
Also worth mentioning is the Samsung T5 EVO, which can come with up to 8TB of storage, for a fairly reasonable $450. The WD Elements 6TB Portable Hard Drive is also worth a look.