Potentially hundreds of refurbished Seagate 28TB SMR hard drives are appearing online at incredible prices, but you should stay far away from them: here’s why
Anyone who has tried to find the best hard drives in huge sizes has probably come across Seagate’s Exos range, which can go up to 32TB (yes, you read that right).
Announced in January 2024, the Seagate Exos Mosaic 3+ is one of the largest hard drives money can buy, and the great thing about it is that anyone can use the Exos series with their own machine. These are not just designed for operators of large-scale data centers and the like.
Building a 32TB hard drive isn’t easy, and Seagate had to use a lot of new technologies to achieve that, especially at a reasonable price. Most notable is the use of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), which allows tracks on the hard drive to overlap, creating a higher density hard drive.
Most hard drives use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR), which has been the standard for a number of years, but the technology simply wouldn’t be able to create a 32TB hard drive that isn’t huge.
Seagate used a 3TB platter, with an areal density of 1.742Tb per square inch, and uses SMR or, for hyperscale customers, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The precious record was Western Digital Gold, which reached 24 TB.
Watch out for the renovation of Exos
But note: we recently did that noted hundreds of refurbished Seagate 28TB SMR hard drives have surfaced online at incredible prices. While this may sound good in principle, the problem is that a refurbished product has most likely been returned by its owners and is therefore at fault.
Seagate launched the Exos range in early 2024, so there was plenty of time for customers to place orders, find a fault and return the super high-end hard drives to the manufacturer.
Finding reliable figures on how much the Exos range costs new is difficult, but the refurbished model which costs €549.99 for 28TB of storage is likely extremely cheap in comparison.
What is the best huge hard drive?
TechRadar spent many hours testing the largest SSDs and hard drives on the market today, and we found that the ExaDrive EDDCT100/EDDCS100 tops the list, with an incredible 100TB of storage, as well as options on the more modest end of the spectrum.
It’s worth checking out the Samsung T5 EVOwhich can come with up to 8TB of storage, for a pretty reasonable $450. The WD Elements 6TB portable hard drive may also be worth checking out.
