Specifications
Product Family
Seagate Exos M (HAMR) and Exos X24 — unified under the single Exos enterprise brand
Flagship Capacity
30TB CMR, standard model ST30000NM004K (512e, Instant Secure Erase)
Second Model
Exos X24 24TB conventional PMR CMR nearline drive
Areal Density
3TB per platter — industry first, across a 10-platter stack
Recording Technology
HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) on the Mozaic 3+ platform; Class 1 laser product
Interface
6.0 Gb/s SATA (12 Gb/s SAS variants available across the Exos family)
Spindle Speed
7200 RPM
Cache Buffer
512 MB multisegmented cache
Sustained Transfer Rate
Up to 275 MB/s (262 MiB/s) at outer diameter
Random 4K QD16
170 IOPS read / 350 IOPS write
Average Latency
4.16 ms
MTBF
2.5 million hours
Annualised Failure Rate
0.35% at 24x7 operation
Workload Rating
550 TB transferred per year
Unrecoverable Read Errors
1 sector per 10^15 bits read
Idle Power
6.9 W average; 9.5 W max operating (random read 4K/160Q)
Power Efficiency
Up to 3x greater power efficiency per terabyte versus prior enterprise HDDs
Data Security
Seagate Secure with Instant Secure Erase (ISE); SED models available
Sealing
Helium-sealed drive design with Super Parity and low-halogen construction
Form Factor and Weight
3.5-inch, 26.1 mm height, 101.85 x 147.0 mm, 850 g
Environmental
10 to 60 C operating; 50 Gs operating shock (2 ms); 12.5 rad/sec rotational vibration tolerance
Warranty
5-year limited warranty
Overview
The Seagate Exos M is the first hard drive in production to reach 3TB per platter, delivering 30TB of conventional magnetic recording capacity in an unchanged 3.5-inch, 26.1 mm-high form factor. It is built on Seagate's Mozaic 3+ platform, which combines HAMR media, a plasmonic writer and a 12nm integrated controller; a Class 1 laser warning on the drive label is the visible marker of HAMR media.
For AI infrastructure the practical consequence is density without re-architecture. Because the Exos M uses the same interface, mounting, power envelope and cooling profile as the previous Exos generations, a 30TB drive drops straight into an existing JBOD shelf or rack-scale storage node. Seagate reports that more than 90% of the components are carried over from proven enterprise designs, with a 2.5 million-hour MTBF, 0.35% AFR and a 550TB/year workload rating — the reliability envelope hyperscalers require before qualifying a new media type.
The Exos mix matters more than ever in 2026 because AI workloads re-created a genuine demand for spinning capacity. Training corpora, checkpoints, model and dataset archives, cold RAG vector stores and video-surveillance retention all scale in the petabytes and are economically pinned to HDD tiers, with NVMe reserved for the hot path. QS Compute supplies the Exos M, Exos X24 and the wider Exos family alongside the matching NVMe tiers so a single RFQ can cover an entire AI storage pyramid.
Key Benefits
3TB per platter raises rack capacity roughly 25% over 24TB class drives with no change to power, cooling or shelf firmware. 3x better power efficiency per terabyte lowers both energy and cooling cost per stored byte. 2.5M-hour MTBF, 0.35% AFR and 550TB/year make it deployable in always-on AI pipelines rather than archive-only tiers. ISE and SED give cryptographic erase for compliant data-lifecycle management, and backward-compatible mechanics mean no requalification of chassis, backplanes or vibration damping.
Applications
Hyperscale and private-cloud nearline storage for AI training corpora; checkpoint and shard stores for LLM training runs; object and S3-compatible data lakes; cold vector databases and RAG document archives; media asset and rendering libraries; video-surveillance retention at scale; backup and disaster-recovery targets; compliance archives requiring encrypted media.
Request a Quote — SEAGATE EXOS M AND EXOS X24 HAMR ENTERPRISE HDDS — 30TB MOZAIC 3+ STORAGE FOR AI DATA LAKES
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