30TB+ HAMR hard drives are currently qualified by a major cloud provider.

Last week Seagate started shipping the first 30TB hard drives with HAMR technology, short for Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. The discs are final qualification samples and have been sent to a cloud partner. Seagate expects sales related to these drives later this quarter, according to SeekingAlpha.

The latter is an important detail. Once qualified, Seagate can invoice the cloud partner and begin delivery to other parties. The manufacturer expects HAMR to be available in general hard drives for the first time in Q3 this year, not just in the data center variants.

HAMR is a technology that allows hard drives to magnetically store more data on a hard drive. This means a significant increase in capacity on drives of the same physical size as current hard drives. HAMR is a key pillar for the future of hard drives and Seagate has been deeply committed to its development for years.

Seagate emphasizes that the volume of HAMR-based hard drives will not be significant this year, but this number should increase significantly in the coming years as the technology becomes more efficient.

Originally, Seagate wanted to reserve HAMR only on high-end data center drives, but now it wants to roll out the technology to all of its drives. With this, it wants to limit production costs by concentrating everything on one technology in order to be more profitable.

That extra profitability is important because Seagate will have to pay a $300 million fine for shipping 7.4 million hard drives to Huawei over the next five years when a trade ban was active. Seagate can pay the fine in installments of $15 million per quarter for the next five years.