ADAM ENGST 16 July 2025

In a press release that scores high on the buzzword count, Seagate writes:

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a global leader in mass-capacity data storage, today announced the global channel availability of up to 30TB Exos ®M and IronWolf® Pro hard drives. Built on Seagate’s Mozaic3+™ platform and powered by heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, these drives are engineered to meet increasing demand for scalable, high-performance storage driven by the rise of AI deployments that are supplementing traditional enterprise infrastructure development.

My first hard drive in 1989 was a Seagate 30 MB drive (see “The Mac Turns 25: Our First Macs,” 25 January 2009), so it’s somewhat sobering to realize that these new Seagate 30 TB drives can store (cue the Dr. Evil accent) one million times more data for $600. In fact, the 1989 drive (available for about $250) would cost roughly the same $600 in today’s dollars, meaning that the price per megabyte has also dropped by a factor of one million, from $20 to $0.00002.

Claims about AI aside, $600 isn’t much if you need 30 TB of storage for any purpose. The hard part will be backing up that much data.