This Tuesday, Seagate presented its Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings report and during the presentation it offered some updated storage roadmap details. The company says that new 50 TB HAMR hard drives are planned for customer validation in 2027. The current Mozaic 4+ platform supports drives up to 44 TB and is built around Seagate's Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording Technology (HAMR). By the end of 2026, the company expects that Mozaic 4+ models will account for 50% of its HAMR exabytes shipped to customers. "We expect to achieve our next ramp milestone by exiting calendar 2026 with 50% of our HAMR exabytes on our Mozaic 4 platform," CEO, Dave Mosley said. CFO Gianluca Romano confirmed the company is on track to exceed 5 TB per platter and since Seagate flagship-tier HDDs use ten platters, we will have 50 TB per drive. The next step is Mozaic 5+, the third generation of the platform, which will enable that +5 TB per platter density. As mentioned, first Mozaic 5+ drives are expected to ship to customers for qualification later in 2027, after which they go through OEM and data center validation before any broader availability.

Seagate also has a lab demonstration target of 10 TB per platter around 2028, which would eventually bring drives close to the 100 TB range. Last year, Seagate disclosed that it successfully produced a prototype platter capable of storing roughly 6.9 TB of data and is trying to reach 8 TB per platter. The broader capacity roadmap runs from 40-44 TB in the 2027/2028 window, scaling to 50-60 TB around 2030, and pushing past 80 TB in the 2031/2032 timeframe. Worth keeping in mind what "customers" means in this context, these drives first go to Big Tech, enterprises and AI companies, not retail. Consumer availability typically follows years later, if at all.