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

News By Max Slater-Robins published 10 October 2024

Anyone who has tried to find the best hard drives at massive sizes has likely come across the Seagate's Exos range, which can go up to 32TB (yes, you read that right). 

Announced back in January 2024, the Seagate 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 for hyperscale data center operators 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 using Shingled 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 was Western Digital Gold, which hit 24TB. 

Watch out for refurb Exos

But beware: we've recently noticed hundreds 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.

Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!

Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors