Seagate Exos M 36TB HAMR Enterprise Hard Drive

The Seagate Exos M 36TB represents a landmark achievement in magnetic storage engineering, leveraging Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology alongside Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to achieve unprecedented areal density on a 3.5-inch form factor. HAMR employs a near-field transducer laser to momentarily heat the recording medium to approximately 450°C at the point of write, enabling stable data writing on high-coercivity FePt (iron-platinum) media that would otherwise resist conventional perpendicular recording heads. This combination of HAMR and SMR allows Seagate to pack over 36TB of raw capacity across ten platters, making it the highest-capacity rotating disk drive available for commercial hyperscale infrastructure as of its Q1 2026 launch.

The Exos M 36TB is architected specifically for large-scale cloud and hyperscale data center environments where total cost of ownership per terabyte is the dominant procurement metric. SMR technology organizes tracks in overlapping bands, requiring sequential write management typically handled at the host or drive firmware level; the Exos M supports both Host-Managed SMR (HM-SMR) and Drive-Managed SMR (DM-SMR) operational modes, giving operators flexibility depending on their storage stack. With a sustained transfer rate exceeding 260 MB/s and a 7200 RPM spindle speed, the drive delivers the throughput profile suited to sequential-dominant cold and warm storage tiers where data is ingested in bulk and read infrequently at scale.

Seagate's HAMR media platform on the Exos M incorporates advanced PowerBalance technology to dynamically adjust rotational vibration compensation and power draw, enabling large JBOD enclosures to operate with improved per-drive power efficiency versus prior-generation CMR Exos drives at equivalent usable capacity points. The drive ships with a 512MB DRAM cache and supports SATA 6Gb/s and SAS 12Gb/s interface options, integrating directly into existing enterprise SAS expander topologies without infrastructure redesign. Certified for 550TB per year workload rating and targeting 24×7 continuous operation, the Exos M 36TB is positioned as the foundational storage medium for petabyte-scale object storage clusters, backup repositories, and archival cold storage vaults operated by hyperscalers, cloud service providers, and large enterprise IT organizations.

Ideal for

• Hyperscale object storage clusters (e.g., S3-compatible platforms) requiring maximum raw TB per rack unit to minimize footprint and power consumption per petabyte
• Cloud cold storage tiers for infrequently accessed data such as log archives, compliance records, and long-term backup snapshots where sequential throughput is prioritized over IOPS
• Large-scale media and entertainment content repositories storing uncompressed 4K/8K video masters and digital cinema archives requiring deep, dense, cost-efficient bulk storage
• Enterprise backup and disaster recovery target infrastructure where high-capacity drives reduce the number of spindles needed to store full organizational backup sets
• Scientific and genomic research data lakes accumulating petabytes of raw sequencing, simulation, or observational data requiring sequential write ingestion at sustained throughput
• Petabyte-scale NAS and scale-out file system deployments (e.g., Lustre, GPFS, CephFS) serving as capacity tier beneath a flash-based performance tier in a tiered storage architecture

Technical specifications

Available from Omnixon Global. Submit an RFQ and our team will confirm configuration and availability for your order.