Seagate's inaugural Datasphere 2020 conference was the perfect opportunity for the storage giant to introduce exciting new products and technologies. And the company duly delivered, confirming what we all wanted to know: that the world's largest hard drive, the Exos 20+, will launch in December 2020. The internal hard drive will be the first to feature HAMR actuator technology (which increases capacity) and MACH2, designed to maintain performance SLA as capacity scales up to 50TB. Seagate CEO Dr. Dave Mosley also presented two particularly interesting slides, the first of which shows almost a third of the TCO savings of storing 1PB per 18TB, compared to 8TB. The second showed the relative price per PB when using a 20TB HAMR, compared to a 50TB version, and demonstrated that the continued rapid adoption of higher capacity HDDs by hyperscalers offer a "cost- lasting benefit." With that in mind, Seagate also released CORTX, an open source S3-compatible object storage software storage platform, as well as a reference architecture called the Lyve Drive rack that can provide up to 106 drives (or 2 Po) per rack. node. Earlier this month, Seagate and WD launched 12TB hard drives based on CMR and PMR technologies. It will be interesting to see if cloud backup specialist BackBlaze uses these latest high-capacity drives for its cloud storage service, giving us quick feedback on performance and reliability.