Potentially hundreds of refurbished Seagate 28TB SMR hard disk drives surface online at unbelievable prices but you should stay well clear from them: Here’s why
Seagate’s 28TB SMR hard disk drives are the biggest ever, but watch out for these refurb units
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Anyone who has tried to find thebest hard drivesat massive sizes has likely come across theSeagate’s Exos range, which can go up to 32TB (yes, you read that right).
Announcedback in January 2024, theSeagate Exos Mozaic 3+is one of the largest hard drives money can buy, and the beauty of it is that anyone can use the Exos series with their own machine. These aren’t just designed forhyperscale data centeroperators and the like.
Building a 32TB hard drive isn’t easy, and Seagate had to leverage a lot of new technologies to get there, especially for a reasonable price point. The most notable is usingShingled Magnetic Recording(SMR), which allows hard disk tracks to overlap, creating a hard drive with higher densities.
Most hard drives use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR), which has been the standard for a number of years, but the tech simply would not be able to create a 32TB hard drive that wasn’t massive.
Seagate used 3TB platter, with an areal density of 1.742 Tb per square inch, and makes use of SMR or, for hyperscale customers, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The precious record wasWestern Digital Gold, which hit 24TB.
Watch out for refurb Exos
But beware: we’ve recentlynoticedhundreds of refurbished Seagate 28TB SMR hard disk drives that have surfaced online at pretty unbelievable prices. While this might sound good in principle, the problem is that a refurbished product has very likely been sent back by its owners, and therefore has a fault.
Seagate launched the Exos range in early 2024, and so there has been enough time for customers to make orders, find a fault, and send the super high-end hard drives back to the manufacturer.
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Finding reliable figures for how much the Exos range costs new is difficult, but the refurbished model costing €549.99 for 28TB of storage is likely to be extremely cheap in comparison.
What is the best massive hard drive?
TechRadar has spent plenty of hours testing thelargest SSD and hard driveson the market right now, and we found that theExaDrive EDDCT100/EDDCS100tops the list, with an incredible 100TB of storage on offer, as well as options on the more modest end of the spectrum.
It’s worth also shouting out theSamsung T5 EVO, which can come with up to 8TB of storage, for a pretty reasonable $450, too. TheWD Elements 6TB portable HDDcould also be worth checking out.
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Max Slater-Robins has been writing about technology for nearly a decade at various outlets, covering the rise of the technology giants, trends in enterprise and SaaS companies, and much more besides. Originally from Suffolk, he currently lives in London and likes a good night out and walks in the countryside.
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