Seagate Exos M 30TB HDD Review

1. Introduction2. Seagate Exos M 30TB3. Testing Methodology4. ATTO Disk Benchmark5. 4K Random Performance6. Throughput7. Workload Scenarios8. UL Solutions PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark9. SPEC Workstation 3.110. Real Life File Testing11. Closing Thoughts12. View All Pages

With the rapid rise of AI, any notion that storage demands are slowing down has been firmly shown the exit door. Seagate's Exos M 30TB drive has been designed to meet this demand, delivering more capacity per rack while maintaining the same small footprint for a reduced overall total cost of ownership. It also uses technology that points the way to even bigger capacity drives in the near future. Seagate's Exos M 30TB (along with the 30TB IronWolf Pro) are the first HAMR hard drives to become fully available to the market using Seagate's Mozaic 3+ platform technology.

HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology uses an extremely precisely aimed laser to heat up a section of the disc medium to write the data in. Using this technology means that discs will have very high areal densities and therefore more capacity per disk. Seagate has used HAMR to produce the ten 3TB discs that Exos M uses.

While it's great to have more capacity on offer for rack-based storage solutions, the real trick is to do while keeping power consumption and therefore operating costs as low as possible. Seagate claims that the Exos M offers up to three times the power efficiency per TB  over other enterprise drives and has been engineered for better cooling performance, both of which help in reducing operating costs. PowerChoice is Seagate’s own implementation of the T10/09-054 and T13 Standard No T13/452-2008 and uses four step-by-step modes to enhance power savings while the drive is in idle periods longer than a second. Seagate claims that savings up to 54% can be made on drive power consumption in enterprise environments with PowerChoice technology.

Typically, PowerChoice is enabled via a SATA Set Feature command (or via the SAS Mode Page for a SAS drive). This allows flexibility so that optimal idle times can be set for a particular storage application. Once the technology has been enabled, it puts the drive into deeper and deeper idle power states the longer the drive is idle.

Seagate’s PowerBalance feature helps optimise the IOPS/Watt for even greater efficiency in environments with a focus on random read/write operations.

Seagate quotes an official maximum transfer rate of 275MB/s for the 30TB Exos M. When tested with the ATTO benchmark, we couldn't quite get to that maximum with read/write results of 260MB/s and 253MB/s, respectively.

We found the 30TB Seagate Exos M on Scan for £599.99 (inc VAT) HERE.

Pros

• Huge capacity.
• Overall performance.
• Power-saving features.
• Drive write/read technologies
• 5-year warranty.

Cons

• Not cheap.

KitGuru says: Seagate’s latest flagship hard drive family for the enterprise sector has been designed to make the most of rack space in enterprise environments, thanks to its huge 30TB capacity. It also uses technology in the shape of Seagate's Mozaic 3+ platform technology that points the way to even larger capacity drives in the not-so-distant future.

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