Seagate unveils strategy to build long-term data value

Source: Seagate. Seagate's data storage portfolio addresses workloads from cloud to edge.

IDC has forecast that an estimated 394 ZB* of data will be generated in 2028 thanks to AI, and Seagate Technology Holdings, a mass-capacity data storage company, will keep pace with 50 TB drives. The company launched its first 30 TB drive in 2024, and expects to have a 40 TB drive ready by 2026.

“Technology innovation and AI are fueling exponential data growth and driving demand for the hard drive storage industry. Seagate today is uniquely positioned to capture this opportunity with our Mozaic portfolio powered by market-leading HAMR technology. Our differentiated portfolio addresses critical data center challenges, including cost, scale and sustainability, enabling us to deliver storage solutions for customers from cloud to edge,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate’s CEO.

“Since our last Investor and Analyst Event in 2021, we have made structural improvements to extend demand visibility, maintain supply discipline, optimise product mix, and streamline cost structure. We are a stronger company today thanks to the dedicated efforts of our global team. 

"This is an incredibly exciting time at Seagate, and we are confident we have the right technology and strategy to lead the next era of storage in today’s data-driven world, while delivering enhanced value to shareholders.”

At its 2025 Analyst and Investor Event, Seagate said that heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) hard drive technology is expected to contribute to its future success, as will the company's broad data storage portfolio. HAMR boosts areal density to enable higher storage capacities, lower power consumption, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).

The benefits add up, Seagate said. If 2.4 TB can be stored on a disk using the more traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, HAMR will enable 4 TB to be stored on the same disk. Extrapolating further, 25,000 10-disk HAMR drives will provide an exabyte of storage capacity, compared to 42,000 10-disk PMR drives - 10 disks is the maximum in a drive for now. The company estimated that businesses will see 40% improvement with Seagate Mozaic 4+ (HAMR) drives in a 1 exabyte deployment against using PMR drives.

As Pablo Ziperovich, GM of the Azure Memory and Storage Center of Excellence, Microsoft explained during the 2025 Analyst and Investor Event: "Higher capacity hard drives enables us to reach the desired capacity that we want in the data centre with less number of devices. Less number of devices means lower power per terabyte, and that means that we can either save energy or actually spend the energy in other parts of the data centre."

A million Mozaic (HAMR) drives have been shipped to date. They are now so popular, HAMR is now being leveraged to retool existing lower-capacity products so that fewer disks are needed, Seagate said. HAMR 3.0 makes 30 TB drives possible, while proprietary vertically-integrated laser technology will be used for the next iteration of Mozaic. 

Mozaic 4+ customer qualification begins Q325, and involves drives of up to 44 TB. By 2028, 50 TB drives and an areal density of 10 TB per disk are projected. Seagate's forecasts include 65 TB drives and more than 15 TB per disk in the far future.

The company has three global cloud customers using Mozaic drives that have 3 TB or more per disk and is shipping product to them in exabyte volumes. Mozaic drives with 4 TB or more per disk are being trialled with a communications service provider (CSP) with shipments to the customer expected to ramp up in 2026, while exabyte shipments of Mozaic drives are expected to contribute half of all Mozaic shipments by 2H26.

While other forms of storage exist, Seagate argues that the traditional hard drive is still the sweet spot for storage:

- Cost advantage. Cost per TB is roughly 6x lower for hard drives against solid state drives, according to Forward Insights Q1’25 SSD Insights and Seagate internal estimates.

- Capital-efficiency. A Seagate analysis of NAND flash storage technology and capex projections found that it would cost US$1 B to meet projected storage demand with hard drives as opposed to US$240 B to meet the same demand with NAND drives.

- Optimised capacity. Hard drives store 87% of the data in large data centre deployments, according to the IDC Cloud Infrastructure Index 2025.

Seagate further said that four key drivers are accelerating data growth, which also points to a rosy future for storage providers:

- Richer content. According to Seagate, 15 billion photos have been taken in the last 150 years. AI has taken 1.5 years to create the same volume. The typical minute-long video, on the other hand, has a 100x larger file size compared to a high-definition image.

- Data replication and transformation. Data is being replicated and stored closer to the end user to improve access time, while gen AI transforms data from text to image to video in seconds.

- Longer data retention. Industries and governments are extending data retention policies for stronger accountability. At the same time, trust in AI models can only occur if training checkpoints and inference data are stored. This also improves efficiency and accuracy. 

- Regulations and data sovereignty. Seagate said over 150 countries now have digital data protection
laws with on-shore data requirements. And with more than 80% of the data centres in the world
located in only 10 countries, copies of data may be required elsewhere.

AI edge use cases are also driving demand for storage, according to Harbor Research. Real-time data-driven trading is underpinning a CAGR of 40% for data generated in the financial services sector, followed by autonomous, agent-based security pushing a CAGR of 36% for data generated in the video intelligence industry. In third position is manufacturing optimisation in smart factories, which will generate a data CAGR of 31%.

*1 ZB is equivalent to a billion TB.