TALLINN, Estonia, July 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leil Storage today announces SaunaFS 5.0 support for the newly available Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, further enhancing its leading open-source distributed file system for exabyte-scale, on-premises workloads. With this update, SaunaFS 5.0 fully supports HAMR SMR drives from Seagate Technology, LLC, a global, mass capacity data storage leader, enabling integration with the industry's largest hard drives and raising the benchmark for sustainable, large-scale storage systems.

Breakthrough Storage Capacity and Efficiency

By supporting the general availability of HAMR drives built on Mozaic3+™ platform, SaunaFS 5.0 gives customers access to the highest single-drive capacities in the sector. Pairing advanced laser-assisted writing (HAMR) with shingled track management (SMR), organizations can benefit from cutting-edge areal density ideal for hyperscale, nearline, and archival workloads.

Key features introduced in this release include:

• Native HAMR SMR compatibility: Fast, easy deployment of Seagate Technology, LLC's Mozaic3+™ HAMR SMR drives.
• Flexible clustering and easy start: Mixed operation across CMR, HAMR, and HAMR SMR drives, even at different capacities.
• Performance gains: Data-handling optimizations have achieved a significant performance boost for both reads and writes.
• Sustainability-focused design: Enhanced integration with sustainability tools, such as Autonomous Drive Regeneration (ADR) and Leil's own Infinite Cold Engine (ICE), delivering real energy savings in petascale and exabyte-scale environments.

“We've always believed that hyperscale-grade technology shouldn't just be for the tech giants,” said David Gerstein, CTO of Leil Storage. “Getting SaunaFS 5.0 to support HAMR drives in general, and HAMR SMR drives specifically, right as they're hitting the market was a big deal for us - we wanted enterprises of any size to benefit from these massive leaps in storage capacity as soon as possible. This release is all about putting innovative, efficient storage within reach for everyone.”

Leil extends an invitation to all data-intensive organizations to participate in the launch and reap the benefits of hyperscale technologies on-premises for sustainable data generation and consumption, without compromising performance. Special terms are available for research organizations, supercomputing centers, and educational institutions.

About Leil Storage

Leil Storage delivers scalable, sustainable file storage solutions, shaping the future of enterprise data infrastructure. SaunaFS is open source and free to use, with commercial modules available for advanced features and support.

Discover more at leil.io and follow Leil Storage on LinkedIn.

Aleksander Ragel, CEO
Leil Storage & SaunaFS
Mobile: +372 560 44462