Areal Density
Why Does Areal Density Matter in the Data Center?
The future of sustainable, mass-capacity storage is now.
Yikes. This 15x gap1 indicates a huge need for more storage. As data continues to explode in the wake of AI productization, enterprise data centers will need to find sustainable ways to scale against limited space, power, and budget.
Imagine a 10-disk hard drive, and each disk can hold 3TB of data. In total, you could store 30TB of data on that drive.
Now imagine the same exact drive—but each disk is increased to 3.33TB instead of just 3TB. Now with only 9 disks, you still achieve the same amount of 30TB.
That’s the magic of areal density, resulting in less build material and less power consumption.
Aside from delivering mass-capacity storage, hard drives with ultra-high areal density can enable data centers to:
The proven path to breakthrough areal density is here with Exos® Mozaic 3+™ mass-capacity hard drives. Built to enable hyper-efficient, sustainable data storage, Exos features Mozaic 3+™, a powerful platform that unleashes areal density of 3TB/disk so that you can store more exabytes than ever—in less space for significantly a lower cost.
IDC StorageSphere. 2024 vs. 2025 install base, IDC Datasphere, 2024 vs. 2025 Incremental New Data Generated.
Based on Exos X24, Max Operating, Random Read/Write 4K/16Q.
Based on 13 cents per kilowatt hour.