Seagate is set to increase the amount of storage it offers in a hard drive next year with not one, but two higher capacity drives.

As AnandTech reports, Seagate has confirmed it plans to ship an 18TB hard drive in the first half of 2020 followed by a 20TB drive in the second half of the year. The 18TB drive will use the same nine-platter design seen in the existing 16TB Exos drive and uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR). However, it's a different story for the 20TB drive.

Seagate is set to move from CMR to SMR for the 20TB drive, which stands for shingled magnetic recording. SMR increases the storage density of a drive by partly overlapping the magnetic tracks where the data is stored. This leaves the previous track narrower, but allows more data to fit within the same platter.

For now, Seagate's largest drives are 16TB and aimed squarely at the enterprise and NAS markets. However, some of the company's customers are receiving heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) versions of those 16TB drives, which should help Seagate perfect its manufacturing process before it inevitably also comes to 20TB drives. HAMR works by temporarily heating the disk material and allowing data to be written to much smaller regions.

Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate, believes HAMR will ensure the company's hard drives continue to grow in storage size for many years to come, explaining, "We are also driving areal density leadership with our revolutionary HAMR technology, which enables Seagate to achieve at least 20% areal density CAGR (compound annual growth rate) over the next decade."

Purchasing an 18TB or 20TB hard drive next year certainly won't be cheap if current pricing is anything to go by. Seagate's 16TB Exos enterprise drive can be picked up for around $420, where as the IronWolf NAS version is closer to $475.

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