Seagate Exos M 30TB, 24/7, 512e / 3.5" / SATA 6Gb/s

Lange mussten wir warten, heute sind sie im Test, Seagates erste HAMR-Festplatten aus den Serien Exos M und IronWolf Pro mit einer Speicherkapazität von jeweils 30 TB. Die ST30000NT011 und ST30000NM004K müssen sich auf unserem Testparcours behaupten und zeigen, was die neue Technologie zu leisten im Stande ist.

My last encounter with a Seagate drive was back in 2019 when they had released their very first 16TB models and so jumping from that to 30TB is a first for me. Yes, HDD performance hasn't really changed since then as evident from my charts (which is why I’ll keep including the same ones I had in 2019) but since we're entering the era of massive capacities I decided to also add extra tests for more demanding audiences, more specifically 32GB tests using the latest version of ATTO (v5.00.2) and 64GB tests using the latest version of Crystal Disk Mark (v9.0.1). Now I don't have every single HDD I've reviewed to date in the lab, so I just benchmarked the ones I've kept. With all of these out of the way it's clear that the Exos M 30TB model by Seagate is among their fastest models to date, if not the fastest one. Not only did it reach over 290MB/s during my tests it also produced the 3rd fastest seek times behind the Exos X16 and Enterprise Capacity 3.5 V6 models again by Seagate. That's not all however since I also recorded the least noise from all the drives in my charts while testing the Exos M and even though that's not a game changer it's always nice to see improvements across the board (which HAMR obviously offers).

Seagate’s Exos M 30TB is the company’s newest high-capacity enterprise HDD, engineered to meet the growing demands of AI, hyperscale storage, and data-intensive cloud environments. As the industry’s first drive to feature 3TB per platter, the Exos M achieves a massive 30TB of raw storage capacity in a familiar 3.5-inch form factor.