Seagate, a perennial believer in hard drive technology, has launched its first slate of commercially available 3.5-inch SATA 32TB HDDs. These new drives span three of Seagate’s current lineups – its SkyHawk AI, Exos and IronWolf Pro lines.
The drives were unveiled earlier this month at Intersec 2026, an expo billed as a global safety, security and fire protection event. To give some context, hard drives of this capacity do exist, such as WD’s Ultrastar DC HC690 HDD, but they’re not typically available through usual consumer channels.
Seagate’s new drives are available off-the-shelf, but as you might’ve assumed based on their large capacities, the company isn’t aiming for the average PC user. Instead, the three drives are intended to be enterprise solutions with different focuses.
The three new drives aren’t necessarily for non-enterprise PC consumers, except maybe for data hoarders.
That proposition starts with the SkyHawk AI 32TB. The SkyHawk line has typically been geared towards video surveillance, so it’s no surprise why the company decided to unveil it at Intersec. The 32TB drive can store over 10,000 hours of video and analysis; the company states that the larger capacity accommodates the evolving workflow of video analytics, where storage demands are increasing thanks to AI being able to generate searchable details and metadata for every frame.
The SkyHawk AI can also write video from up to 64 HD streams, and supports what Seagate calls ImagePerfect AI, which the company says prevents dropped frames while under intense workloads.
The other two drives, the IronWolf Pro and Exos, are geared towards NAS storage and data centres, respectively. The former supports AgileArray, a suite of hardware and software features designed to make the IronWolf Pro more durable in a NAS setting, while the latter supports the usual power efficiency features found in other Exos drives, including PowerBalance and PowerChoice.
The Exos in particular is built on Seagate’s Mozaic technology. A key feature of Mozaic is the company’s heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) tech, where a laser reduces the magnetic coercivity of the data bits (or grains) on the platter. This allows Seagate to fit more grains (and thus more storage) per platter.
All three HDDs are also conventional magnetic recording (CMR) disks, which makes sense given that the drives are meant for sustained writing tasks. In comparison, shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disks, where data tracks on a platter overlap, provide greater cost-efficiency in dollars per TB, but aren’t suited for constant writing as SMR drives require idle time to reorganise newly written data.
Availability and Pricing
The SRPs for the SkyHawk AI, Exos and IronWolf Pro 32TB drives are US$699.99, US$729.99 and US$849.99 respectively. Local availability for the three drives are somewhat sporadic; you can find the IronWofl Pro 32TB on Seagate’s Shopee store here, though the SkyHawk AI and Exos drives aren’t available here yet.