Seagate achieves a whopping 6.9TB storage capacity per platter in its laboratory — 55TB to 69TB hard drives now physically possible

Hard drives remain a critical component in building high-capacity storage solutions, especially in the data center. IT Home reports that Seagate continues to break barriers on how many TB can be stored on a single hard drive and has achieved 6.9 TB per platter in its lab, making 55 TB to 69 TB hard drives a possibility for the first time.

Seagate’s experimental 6.9TB platter claims more than double the capacity of the platters currently used in official products. Outgoing models like Seagate’s 30TB HAMR HDD use 10 3TB platters to reach maximum capacity. With the 6.9TB platter, Seagate will be able to create drives with more than double the capacity of its outgoing drives in the same form factor.

Seagate is taking advantage of its Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology to deliver its 6.9TB platter. If you want to see how Seagate’s HAMR technology works, check out our previous coverage. In short, HAMR uses heat-induced magnetic coercion to write to the hard drive platter. In Seagate’s outgoing drives, this technology is combined with Mosaic 3+ to reduce media grain size compared to normal HDD platters.