Powering AI at Scale: Dropbox Qualifies Seagate’s Exos M 32TB Drives

Dropbox and Seagate took the next step in scalable, sustainable infrastructure this June, when Dropbox successfully qualified the Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR)-enabled Seagate’s Exos® M 32TB hard drives—powered by the Mozaic 3+™ platform—for deployment in Dropbox data centers. This marks a milestone in Dropbox’s ability to scale for storage and AI workloads while advancing its sustainability goals. The mass-capacity Mozaic 3+ platform enables Dropbox to expand capacity without rearchitecting its infrastructure, and to do so without compromising on power, space, or carbon footprint.

To explore the significance of this qualification and the broader industry context, we chatted with Dropbox’s infrastructure team, Ali Dasdan, CTO, Jesse Lee, Sourcing Tech Lead, and Vishal Jose Mannanal, Storage Technologist.

How are evolving AI workloads reshaping your data infrastructure priorities—especially around storage capacity, performance, and efficiency?

Ali Dasdan: AI is fundamentally changing how we think about infrastructure. It’s not just about storing more data—it’s about storing smarter. The focus is shifting from raw capacity to holistic efficiency. As AI models grow more complex and data-hungry, at Dropbox, we recognize that we must continue to align performance, scalability and efficiency.

AI data is dynamic—constantly ingested, generated, and processed across diverse formats like text, images, and audio. Each stage in the AI lifecycle imposes distinct demands on storage, as larger and richer data sets grow. Selecting the right storage architecture—which is a strategic mix of hard drives and SSDs—has become a critical differentiator for AI success, from application speed to cost optimization and efficiency.

Why did Dropbox choose to integrate Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ platform? How does innovation at the device level—specifically, the leap with Mozaic 3+—enable Dropbox’s data ambitions or solve technical and operational needs that the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology couldn’t?

Jesse Lee: As workloads intensify, we prioritize storage density and cost management without compromising performance. That’s why we integrated Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ platform. This next-generation solution delivers a leap in areal density through HAMR technology, supported by Seagate’s advanced media, redesigned read/write heads, evolved firmware, and seamless host integration—all decisive factors in our adoption.

With high-density storage architecture, acoustic, vibration, and thermal are required engineering considerations. Seagate and Dropbox successfully co-engineered a high-density chassis optimized for these dynamics—ensuring predictable, low-latency access even as we scale.

The result? A win-win partnership that enables Dropbox to future-proof our infrastructure while advancing our AI and data ambitions with precision and confidence.

How was Dropbox able to adopt HAMR technology without major retooling of your architecture?

Vishal Jose Mannanal: Our forward-looking infrastructure strategy enabled frictionless integration of HAMR drives—no new rack design, no complex redesign, and no major infrastructure overhauls of existing architecture.

Dropbox’s storage architecture was intentionally designed for adaptability. By previously adopting Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) for its Magic Pocket platform, the groundwork has been laid for future innovations like HAMR. Mozaic 3+ drives aligned with Dropbox’s existing software stack, leveraging familiar APIs and zone-based write patterns, allowing frictionless adoption of advanced technologies and seamless scalability without rearchitecting.

The result: Dropbox scaled to higher-density storage with minimal disruption—delivering operational excellence and long-term business value, from improved cost efficiency to a reduced energy footprint, all without compromising reliability or performance.

Dropbox has long focused on operational sustainability. As AI drives up storage needs, to what extent does business efficiency equal operational sustainability—or do they sometimes conflict?

Jesse Lee: We are consolidating workloads onto fewer, denser platforms and have seen early wins that deliver a dual impact: both operational efficiency and sustainability gains. Higher storage density per server means lesser servers— directly reducing power, cooling, and maintenance overhead. At the same time, it optimizes data center space, minimizing e-waste and raw material consumption.

The early investment pays off as the hardware upgrade significantly lowers TCO across the lifecycle, aligning financial prudence with long-term sustainability.

What early efficiency or sustainability gains has Dropbox achieved with higher-capacity drives, and how do these early results scale to long-term impact?

Ali Dasdan: Adopting Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ platform has been a game-changer in building Dropbox’s most cost-efficient data centers to date. By significantly increasing drive areal density, we’ve optimized our TCO on multiple fronts—reducing the physical number of drives, racks, and network infrastructure needed to achieve the same storage targets.

The immediate gains are clear: moving from our 4th to 7th generation hardware that allows us to enable Mozaic, we’ve cut power consumption by 50% and reduced physical footprint by 75% per exabyte of storage. This translates into tangible OpEx savings across power, cooling, and drive maintenance, while lowering CapEx by minimizing hardware and infrastructure requirements.

Beyond the operational efficiencies, these early wins stack up to a larger, long-term sustainability impact—shrinking our carbon footprint while enhancing our ability to scale seamlessly as data demands grow. The strategic payoff is a data center ecosystem that’s leaner, greener, and built for the AI-driven workloads of tomorrow.

Looking ahead, how does investing in high-capacity, energy-optimized platforms like Mozaic 3+ help Dropbox scale future workloads while meeting ESG goals?

Vishal Jose Mannanal: Investing in major platforms like Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ allows us to advance two critical priorities in parallel: scalable performance and environmental responsibility.

Mozaic 3+ solves challenges that legacy PMR drives couldn’t. By deploying mass-capacity hard drives in high-density architectures, we gain access to unprecedented areal density in the industry of more than 3TB per disk and enable you to scale in a shorter period of time. They deliver optimal performance at scale for a vast majority of modern workloads.

At the same time, hard drives powered by Mozaic 3+ help us consolidate server hardware and use fewer drives, which in turn lowers energy consumption per petabyte stored, shrinks our physical infrastructure footprint, and reduces both cooling needs and raw material usage. This translates to a continuous year-over-year reduction in our Watts-per-Petabyte (W/PB) metric—a direct driver of both operational efficiency and carbon impact reduction.

As data growth continues, platforms like Mozaic 3+ are core to future-proofing our infrastructure footprint and how we build an agile, resilient, and climate-conscious data foundation for the future.

How do Dropbox’s infrastructure decisions today help future-proof your platform for AI models that will only get larger, more disaggregated, and more power-hungry?

Ali Dasdan: The infrastructure decisions we make today will continue to shape the future. We are architecting for scale, precision, and adaptability—building our infrastructure strategy on three pillars: platform integration, supplier alignment, and operational flexibility.

As demand for AI solutions grows, Dropbox is reviewing our hardware tiers, exploring liquid cooling, and refining acoustic and thermal management—especially as HAMR-based storage scales and becomes a cornerstone of our future-ready infrastructure.

This mindset of continuous innovation will continue to be the focus area for Dropbox.

Why was partnering with Seagate the right strategic choice for Dropbox?

Jesse Lee: Dropbox and Seagate share a truly collaborative, innovation-led, and multi-faceted partnership that goes far beyond a traditional buyer-seller engagement.

Together, we’ve co-engineered and deployed advanced storage technologies—from enabling SMR to jointly characterizing HAMR-enabled server systems, and integrating Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ platform into Dropbox’s production environment. This collaboration has allowed Dropbox to scale high-density storage with precision and efficiency.

Beyond infrastructure, we’ve had go-to-market alignment including Seagate’s Ultra Touch product line, where customers benefit from automatic backup to Dropbox via external hard drives. Dropbox also created a unique customer profile as Seagate’s fully enabled storage partner—by leveraging Seagate hard drives on-premises and in Lyve Cloud.

This partnership exemplifies how strategic alignment and shared innovation can unlock new possibilities for data platforms at scale.

Finally, for peers wrestling with where to invest to keep up with AI-driven data demands while staying sustainable, what’s your advice on preparing storage and compute infrastructure to handle the next wave?

Ali Dasdan: The future of infrastructure is about scaling smart—not just scaling big. Our three-point strategy for future-ready infrastructure is as follows: First, build an innovation engine. Second, unify infrastructure strategy. Third, invest in strategic partnerships.

To stay ahead in performance, efficiency, and sustainability, it's crucial to build an innovation engine by embracing emerging technologies—platforms like Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ are great examples, offering gains in both density and energy savings. At the same time, it’s important to unify your infrastructure strategy by thinking holistically about storage and compute. Especially with AI workloads, tight integration between the two helps maximize throughput and reduce waste. And finally, scale isn’t something you achieve alone. Strategic partnerships—like the one between Dropbox and Seagate—play a key role in accelerating capabilities, co-engineering solutions, and future-proofing operations.