Seagate is now shipping a 16TB version of its helium-based Exos enterprise hard drives, billed as the industry’s first to deliver this level of capacity.
The Exos X16 16TB joins Seagate’s existing family of Exos X12 and Exos X10 3.5in 7,200RPM enterprise hard drives and is available from today at a suggested price of $629 (£497).
Not surprisingly, Seagate touts the drive as ideal for customers such as hyperscale data centres, simply because it holds out the promise of 33 per cent more storage capacity per rack compared to 12TB drives, while maintaining the same standard 3.5in form factor for a reduced overall total cost of ownership.
As well as boasting that the new drive delivers the highest storage density available, Seagate said it has the field-proven reliability and continuous high performance to support a broad range of workload requirements and high-availability use cases.
Full specifications for the Exos X16 have yet to be made available, but the other drives in the range come in versions with either a 6Gbit/s SATA or 12Gbit/s SAS host interface and an MTBF rating of 2.5 million hours.
Self-encrypting drive (SED) versions are also available, and Seagate said that Exos X16 offers built-in data protection, including Seagate‘s Instant Secure Erase technology designed to simplify decommissioning of drives at the end of their lifecycle.
Seagate has also yet to offer performance figures, but one customer – Inspur – has already had a chance to test out the 16TB unit.
“For Seagate’s 16TB helium-based Exos X16 enterprise drive, we have completed a series of joint tests, which indicate it delivers high performance with support for varying workloads, allowing us to increase system capacity and reduce deployment complexity, whilst considerably lowering total cost of ownership,” Inspur vice president Peng Zhen said in a canned statement.
It isn’t just the Exos line getting the 16TB treatment – Seagate has also extended its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro lines with 16TB versions. These hard drives are optimised for multi-user NAS environments, capable of supporting workloads up to 300TB/year.
