Seagate's 50TB HAMR Drives Head Toward 2028 Shipments

Seagate expects to qualify 50TB-class HAMR drives in late 2027 and ship in 2028, with most capacity already committed through calendar 2028.

Seagate expects to begin customer qualification of its 50TB-class HAMR hard drives in late 2027, with shipments in 2028 and volume ramp in 2029. The drives run on the company's Mozaic 5 platform, its third-generation HAMR technology, which enables platters over 5TB and lets a 10-platter drive exceed 50TB. Both CMR and SMR configurations are planned.

Demand is running ahead of supply. CEO Dave Mosley said the vast majority of nearline exabytes are already allocated into calendar 2028 under long-term supply agreements that fix configuration and prices for all of 2027. HAMR products made up 40% of Seagate's nearline exabyte share in early July, tracking toward 70% a year later. The company reported fiscal Q4 2026 revenue of $3.629 billion, up from $2.444 billion, with gross margin climbing to 52.3%.

Denser drives are how the long collapse in storage cost continues even as AI-driven data creation surges. Fitting more terabytes onto the same platter count lowers the cost per gigabyte of keeping information, which underwrites everything from archives to public datasets to the model training that depends on cheap capacity.

The figures here come from Seagate's own earnings call, and much of the roadmap reflects projections rather than confirmed shipments. Server OEMs typically need two to six months to qualify new drives and hyperscalers six to twelve, so the gap between qualification and broad availability is real. Whether the 2028 timeline holds is the thing to watch.

Source: Tom's Hardware