Seagate Mozaic HAMR+SMR Drives Win Broadcom HBA Approval as Azure Qualifies

Seagate Technology announced on October 26, 2026 that its Mozaic drives, built on heat-assisted magnetic recording and configured with shingled magnetic recording, are the first and only SMR drives added to Broadcom's approved vendor list for its host bus adapter. Business Wire published the announcement.

Seagate Mozaic Drives and the Broadcom HBA

The Broadcom HBA connects servers to storage and lets data centers deploy and manage large fleets of hard drives. Seagate's Mozaic platform uses HAMR technology and enables continued increases in storage density and drive capacity, and HAMR-based Mozaic drives can also be configured with SMR, which organizes data tracks more densely to increase usable capacity for appropriate workloads.

Microsoft Azure Storage completed qualification of the Broadcom HBA with Seagate HAMR + SMR technology, providing a real-world proof point for the configuration at hyperscale. "At hyperscale, storage infrastructure has to meet demanding requirements for interoperability, manageability and infrastructure efficiency at scale," said Pablo Ziperovich, general manager, Azure Memory and Storage Center of Excellence at Microsoft. "Microsoft Azure's joint validation and qualification of Seagate and Broadcom's SMR configuration demonstrates how these technologies can work together across large data center deployments, enabling greater storage density at a similar cost and power envelope."

"High-capacity storage innovation delivers the greatest value when customers put that capacity to work efficiently," said Jason Feist, Senior Vice President, Cloud Business. "By pairing Seagate HAMR + SMR storage technology with Broadcom's connectivity infrastructure, we're helping make high-capacity SMR storage more accessible and easier to deploy as AI and cloud data demands grow."

"Expanding HBA support for Seagate SMR technology gives more customers a straightforward path to integrate and manage high-capacity hard drive fleets," said Jas Tremblay, Vice President and General Manager Data Center Solutions Group at Broadcom. "It's an important step toward making HAMR + SMR storage easier to implement across large-scale environments as storage requirements continue to grow."

Broadcom, formerly Avago Technologies, is testing co-packaged optics for AI data centre networks with KDDI, installing a CPO switch in a KDDI data centre using Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 chip, Telecompaper reported on October 22, 2026. The chip has a 102.4 Tbps switching capacity, and testing will assess power consumption alongside network performance.

Seagate's October Product and Pricing Activity

TechRadar reviewed the Seagate One Touch 4TB external hard drive on October 25, 2026 as a portable backup solution with USB-C connectivity and AES 256-bit hardware encryption, offering 4TB capacity at $199.99, with transfer rates over 140MB/s. On October 22, 2026, TechRadar reported that Seagate's IronWolf 8TB NAS drive is priced at $330 on Newegg, cheaper than Best Buy's $349.99, featuring CMR recording, 7200 RPM, and a 180TB annual workload rating. TechRadar also reported on October 19, 2026 that Seagate's Expansion Desktop 16TB HDD is now $419.99 at Newegg, down from $549.99, with a buy-two-for-$200 offer, including Rescue data recovery and a one-year warranty, connecting via USB 3.0 for Windows and macOS.

Availability of the Qualified Configuration

Seagate said the Mozaic drives are the first and only SMR drives added to Broadcom's approved vendor list for its HBA, and Microsoft Azure Storage has completed qualification of the Broadcom HBA with Seagate HAMR + SMR technology. Seagate's website is at www.seagate.com.