- Seagate’s 30TB Exos M is helium-filled and built for data centers, not home PCs
- 2.5 million hours MTBF sounds great until you realize how specific this use case is
- The IronWolf Pro HDD targets NAS users, not hyperscale cloud infrastructure like Exos M
A new listing for Seagate’s 30TB Exos M hard disk drive has appeared online, offering what is currently the largest HDD available for under $620.
ServerSupply lists the drive at $650, but applying the site’s 5% discount brings the price down to $617.50.
Seagate’s Exos M (model ST30000NM004K) is a helium-sealed 3.5-inch internal hard drive built around conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology.
Enterprise-grade capacity at an unexpectedly low price
With a 7200 RPM spindle speed and a 512MB multi-segmented cache, it delivers a sustained data transfer rate of up to 275MB/s.
The drive supports a SATA interface and is hot-plug capable. According to Seagate, it is designed for high-capacity use cases including hyperscale data centers, enterprise backup systems, and distributed file storage frameworks like Hadoop and Ceph.
The manufacturer also reports a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours and an annualized failure rate of just 0.35%, suggesting this model is meant for non-stop, 24/7 operation.
Additional features include PowerBalance and PowerChoice technologies for more efficient energy management, and RSA 3072 firmware verification for security.
These specifications strongly indicate that the Exos M is tailored toward enterprise infrastructure, not the typical desktop setup.
Another Seagate 30TB drive also appears in listings and shares many of the same core specifications. Provantage lists the IronWolf Pro ST300000NT011 HDD for a slightly higher $669.69, still an affordable price for a drive of this capacity.
Although they share similarities (30TB, CMR, 7200 RPM), their firmware, vibration tolerance, and workload optimizations will likely differ because Exos is tuned for hyperscale environments, while IronWolf Pro is optimized for NAS workloads.
Despite the attention-grabbing capacity, calling Seagate Exos M the best HDD depends entirely on context.
For cloud infrastructure and archival storage, it may represent strong value, particularly at this price.
But for everyday users, its 3.5-inch form factor, 7200 RPM speed, and enterprise-oriented feature set make it impractical.
Ultimately, the Seagate Exos M is a highly specialized product, but its pricing makes it look accessible.