Seagate rolls out 30TB drives to keep up with AI's growing demands

Seagate’s new 30TB hard drives are built to help businesses manage growing AI workloads and local data processing needs.

Seagate has launched new 30TB hard drives aimed at helping businesses handle the rising data demands brought on by AI. The company's Exos M and IronWolf Pro (pictured above) models are now available worldwide, built with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology to boost capacity without taking up more space.

The move comes as AI continues to push companies to rethink their infrastructure. Large datasets—used to train and run AI models—require massive storage, and more organizations are now building or upgrading their systems to handle it. Seagate's latest drives are part of that shift.

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According to Seagate, over a million of its Mozaic drives—the platform behind the new models—have already shipped. The new 30TB versions aim to help customers store more data without adding to their energy use or rack space.

Melyssa Banda, who leads edge storage at Seagate, pointed out how the demand for localized data is growing. With more countries adopting data sovereignty laws and AI models being used to analyze proprietary data, companies are moving data storage closer to where it's created and used. She said Seagate's new drives are built to meet that demand—offering more storage, better efficiency, and enough durability to handle intense workloads.

Research firms are seeing the same trend. IDC says companies are pouring money into AI infrastructure. Ed Burns, a research director at IDC, noted that while hard drives aren't known for speed, high-capacity models like these are still vital for AI training. Burns said that Seagate's 30TB Exos is currently the highest-density hard drive available and that tools like these help companies balance performance, cost, and energy use.

Others are watching how on-premises AI setups are changing storage needs, too. HPE expects the on-prem AI market to hit $42 billion within a few years, with edge storage playing a bigger role. NVIDIA also sees data centers becoming "AI factories," where massive datasets get turned into real-time insights.

Seagate's Exos M 30TB is built for heavy workloads in hyperscale and enterprise settings. Meanwhile, the IronWolf Pro 30TB is aimed at NAS setups, which are now used for more than just basic file sharing. As businesses use AI for tasks like video analytics, image recognition, and local inferencing, they need fast, reliable storage that works close to where data is collected.

QNAP's Dhaval Panara said its NAS systems are already handling AI tasks on-site, with Seagate's drives enabling faster, petabyte-level storage. UGREEN's Evan Li added that stable, high-capacity drives like IronWolf Pro are key for edge environments, where data must be processed quickly and locally.