Seagate HAMR+SMR Drives Qualified on Broadcom HBA List, Validated by Microsoft Azure
Seagate's Mozaic drives become the first SMR products on Broadcom's HBA approved vendor list, with qualification completed by Microsoft Azure at hyperscale.
Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX) announced a new interoperability milestone on October 26, 2026, designed to simplify high-capacity storage expansion as AI and cloud workloads drive continued data growth.
Seagate Mozaic™ drives, based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and configured with shingled magnetic recording (SMR), are the first and only SMR drives added to Broadcom's approved vendor list for its host bus adapter (HBA). The HBA connects servers to storage devices, enabling data centers to deploy and manage large fleets of hard drives.
Microsoft Azure Storage has completed qualification of the Broadcom HBA with Seagate HAMR + SMR technology, providing a real-world proof point for the configuration at hyperscale.
Jason Feist, Senior Vice President, Cloud Business at Seagate, stated that pairing Seagate's HAMR + SMR storage technology with Broadcom's connectivity infrastructure helps make high-capacity SMR storage more accessible and easier to deploy. Jas Tremblay, Vice President and General Manager Data Center Solutions Group at Broadcom, noted that expanding HBA support for Seagate SMR technology gives customers a straightforward path to integrate and manage high-capacity hard drive fleets.
Pablo Ziperovich, general manager, Azure Memory and Storage Center of Excellence at Microsoft, emphasized that this joint validation demonstrates how these technologies can work together across large data center deployments, enabling greater storage density at a similar cost and power envelope.