Seagate Says Azure Qualified Broadcom Adapter for HAMR-SMR Drives

Seagate said Oct. 26 that Microsoft Azure Storage had completed technical qualification of a Broadcom host bus adapter with Seagate Technology’s Mozaic drives, marking a compatibility milestone for high-capacity cloud storage.

Seagate described Mozaic as the first and only shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives on Broadcom’s approved vendor list for the adapter. The drives combine SMR with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).

A host bus adapter (HBA) connects servers to storage devices and lets host systems manage large hard-drive fleets. HAMR supports higher storage density. SMR places data tracks closer together to increase usable capacity for workloads suited to the format.

Seagate shipped 789 exabytes of hard-drive capacity in fiscal 2026, up 33% from 595 exabytes in fiscal 2025. Nearline products, used by cloud and enterprise data centers, accounted for about 90% of the company’s fiscal 2026 exabytes shipped.

Jas Tremblay, Broadcom’s vice president and general manager of its Data Center Solutions Group, called the qualification “an important step toward making HAMR + SMR storage easier to implement.”

The announcement disclosed no deployment timeline or drive volume. It also gave no Azure purchase, contract value or expected revenue figure.