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Launched at the same time as the 30TB IronWolf Pro, the 30TB Exos M is designed for use in cutting-edge cloud and enterprise environments and has a feature set that reflects this type of usage. We put it through its paces to find out what it can offer at the £600 asking price.
Seagate's Exos M is built on the company's Mozaic3+ technology, which makes use of HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) to enable the 10 high areal density (3TB) discs the drive uses. It has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm and uses 512MB of cache. Seagate quote an official maximum transfer rate of 275MB/s while the average latency is quoted at 4.16ms.
Seagate quote an average 6.9W idle power rating for the 30TB Exos M with a max operating Random Read (4K QD16) figure of 9.5W.
The official workload rating of the drive is 550TB/year with an MTBF of 2.5M hours, and Seagate backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 30TB.
- Spindle Speed: 7,200rpm.
- No. Of Heads: 20.
- No. Of Platters: 10.
- Cache: 512MB.
- Recording Method: Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) / HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording).
- Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III).
- Form Factor: 3.5in
- Dimensions: 26.1 x 101.85 x 147mm.
- Drive Weight: 695g.
Firmware Version: SE02.
Seagate's Exos M is built on a standard 3.5-inch format with a 26.11mm height. The drive uses Helium technology, allowing Seagate to use ten 3TB platters and 20 heads in the enclosure. The drive has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm and there is 512MB of cache.
The CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) Helium drive is built on Seagate's Mosaic 3+ platform, which implements the second generation of the company's HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology, enabling the high areal density (1841Gb/in²) platters that the drive uses. Seagate's Mozaic 3+ technology has been designed from the ground up to push the boundaries of how much storage space can be offered in a standard 3.5-inch platform by increasing the areal density of platters to new heights by using leading-edge technologies.
Superlattice platinum-alloy media
To get 3TB+ platter capacity, there has to be a move away from the traditional materials that were used in the past to something more exotic that allows for denser writing of data. Seagate's Mozaic 3+ technology uses Superlattice platinum-alloy media, which gets over the obstacle of magnetic instability at the nanoscale level, a byproduct of trying to store ever denser data. The platinum alloy recording media is made up of highly magnetic platinum (Pt) and iron (Fe) particles.
Plasmonic Writer
To prevent data instability, the platinum-alloy media is magnetically harder, which means it needs a completely new approach to writing the data – enter the Plasmonic writer. The writer is made up of three major elements:-
Nanophotonic laser
Produces a focused beam of light to heat up (800º + Fahrenheit) an area of the platinum-alloy media in less than two nanoseconds.
Photonic funnel
Channels the laser light from the laser to the quantum antenna
Quantum antenna
This focuses the laser's energy on a tiny spot on the media surface
So, having written incredibly dense data, the next challenge is to read it; that's where the Gen 7 spintronic reader comes in.
Gen 7 Spintronic Reader
Seagate's Spintronic Reader is one of the world's smallest and most sensitive magnetic field
reading sensors, capable of detecting minute changes in magnetisation. It can accurately read the densely packed data thanks to its very narrow track width, which helps minimise crosstalk errors from neighbouring tracks.
Integrated Controller
With all this going on, you need something to take control of it all, and that's where Seagate's 12nm integrated controller comes in. The new controller is a Seagate in-house design SOC that looks after read channels, disk management, and data exchange protocols. It features the first ever RISC-V processor to be used to control a hard drive, also designed in-house by Seagate.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 32GB DDR4-3200, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and a Gigabyte B550 AORUS Master motherboard.
Other drives
Seagate NAS 8TB
Seagate Exos X16 16TB
Seagate Exos X14 14TB
Seagate Exos X20 20TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB
Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 18TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 30TB
Seagate IronWolf 10TB
Toshiba MG10AFA22TE 22TB
Toshiba MG10ACA20TE 20TB
Toshiba MG08ACA16TE 16TB
Toshiba N300 8TB
Toshiba NAS N300 14TB
Toshiba P300 3TB
Toshiba X300 6TB
WD Gold 12TB
WD Black 6TB
WD Black 4TB
WD Red Pro 22TB
WD Red Pro 20TB
WD Red 4TB
WD Red 8TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 6.0.0.
IOMeter
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration, which ensures that any glitches are removed from the results.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system's performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurement, including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
With the ATTO benchmark, we couldn’t quite hit the maximum official transfer rate of 275MB/s with read/write results of 260MB/s and 253MB/s, respectively.
IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on a hard drive and solid-state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a hard drive, so our results will sometimes differ from the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable.
Seagate's 30TB Exos M won't be breaking any speed records in our 4K random read/write tests, but its performance is consistent, and its write score of 644 IOPS puts it in the middle of the results chart.
In our throughput tests, the 30TB Exos M peaked at 274.44MB/s (512KB block), bang on the official maximum figure. The write performance was actually a little better than the official 275MB/s at 294.98MB/s. However, after peaking, both reads and writes slowly dropped back.
In the read throughput test, the drive peaked at the 512KB block mark at 274MB/s before dropping back to finish the test run at 248MB/s.
In the write throughput test, the Exos X20 peaked at the 8MB block mark at 294MB/s (a little faster than the official maximum) before dropping back slightly to finish the test run at 273MB/s
We tested the 30TB Exos M with a number of scenarios that it may face in the real world. The settings for these scenarios are as follows.
File Server
512MB file size, 16KB Block size
80% Read 20% Write 100% Random
I/O queue depth 128
Web Server
1GB file size, 16KB Block size
100% Read 0% Write 100% Random
I/O queue depth 64
Database
2GB file size, 4KB Block size
90% Read 10% Write, 90% Random, 10% Sequential
I/O depth 128
Workstation
1GB file size, 16KB Block size
70% Read 30% Write, 100% Random, 0% Sequential
I/O depth 6
File Server
Web Server
Database
Workstation
Apart from the File Server test (where it's the fastest drive to date), the Exos M doesn't seem to handle the other workload tests that well.
The PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark has been designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices.
The Data Drive Benchmark uses 3 traces, running 3 passes with each trace.
Trace 1. Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, in to the target drive (write test).
Trace 2. Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
Trace 3. Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test)
The 30TB Exos M handles the rigours of the PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark pretty well with an overall bandwidth figure of 106MB/s with an average access time of 231μs.
SPECworkstation 3.1 is a specialised test designed for benchmarking the key aspects of workstation performance; it uses over 30 workloads, containing nearly 140 tests to test CPU, graphics, I/O, and memory bandwidth. The workloads fall into seven categories;
Media and Entertainment – 3D animation, rendering
Product Development – CAD/CAM/CAE
Life Sciences – medical, molecular
Energy – oil and gas
Financial Services,
General Operations
GPU Compute.
We use the WPCstorage section of the benchmark to test drives, which uses fifteen separate tests.
The WPCstorage workload is designed to benchmark the performance of storage devices by replaying
captured traces from various applications. This workload measures key metrics such as read and write
rates, IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), and overall IO (Input/Output) performance.
We've not used this test before on an HDD drive, but to give some sort of an idea of how the 30TB Seagate Exos M performs, a Gen 3 U.2 based SSD (Kingston (DC1500M 3.84TB) produces an Energy score of 3.81 and a General Operations score of 4.48.
To test the real-life performance of a drive, we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 2TB Koxia Exceria Plus.
118GB Windows 10 backup.
100GB data file.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos).
4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
5.4GB Windows 11 iso .
1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
640MB Dataset 1 – .csv 1,048,576+ rows.
487MB Dataset 2 – 100,011 files, 8 folders.
578MB Dataset 3 – .csv 1,048.576+ rows.
The 30TB Exos M produced very consistent performance when it came to handling our real-life data transfer tests. It averaged 245.29 when writing the data to disk and 229.21MB/s when reading the data back.
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.
