Seagate: In 2020 it will launch 18TB and 20TB HDDs and in 2026 50TB units, half of what was announced last year

Robert Sole November 7, 2019

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Next year Seagate will launch 18TB and 20TB mechanical hard drives and by 2026 50TB drives, half of what was announced last year.

The mechanical hard drive industry, even with SSD capacity on the rise, refuses to die. One of the largest manufacturers of mechanical hard drives today is Seagate. The performance of a mechanical hard drive is much lower than that of SSDs, which are rapidly evolving. The company has taken the opportunity to announce the launch of 18TB and 20TB units for 2020.

These Seagate drives use fairly old and inefficient technologies. The 18TB unit makes use of CRM technology (conventional magnetic recording). On the other hand, the 20TB capacity units are based on SMR (Hermetic Magnetic Recording).

Seagate to launch 18TB and 20TB capacity drives in 2020

We don't know much about HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) drives . As far as we know, this technology won't be implemented in these new drives. SMR is a very old technology, and HAMR should improve performance and efficiency.

Regarding the difference in performance with respect to SSDs, this is brutal. The read and write heads of the mechanical drives is a problem and severely limits performance. Furthermore, the durability of these mechanical parts is short and makes them fragile. SSD drives are much more resistant and efficient as they do not have mechanical parts.

Although the announcement may be interesting, Seagate has also said that they will not launch 50TB units until 2016. It should be noted that at the end of 2018 the company announced 100TB for the year 2025, reducing its forecast by half in one year. While solid state hard drives increase in capacity, performance and fall in price. Also the sale of mechanical hard disk drives decreases, less and less interesting for the majority of users.