Seagate Delivers Industry’s First 16TB Exos & IronWolf Hard Drive

Seagate Announces 16TB Hard Drives

For the disk performance, SSDs can deliver fast read and write speed but they are no match for the traditional hard drives in capacity and price per gigabyte. However, something has changed with the announcement of Seagate 16TB Exos & IronWolf hard drives.

Nearly a year ago, this manufacturer shipped its 14TB hard drives for these models including Barracuda Pro, IronWolf and IronWolf Pro. To meet your needs to large capacity, Seagate has released its new 16TB helium-based to Exos family with data center use and IronWolf & IronWolf Pro for NAS use.

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Similar to Seagate’s currently available 14TB HDDs, the new 16TB HDDs also use two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) technology for the heads.

Features of Seagate 16TB Exos & IronWolf Hard Drives

Now, let’s go to see some highlighted features of these 16TB HDDs on different models.

Seagate 16TB Exos Hard Drive

According to Seagate, the Exos 16TB hard drive is a 3.5-inch 7200 RPM disk with the highest capacity in the world. And it is designed to maximize storage capacities and provide customer flexibility by enabling OEM, hyperscale, datacenter, and distribution channel businesses, as well as reduce complexity by uses in multiple workloads with enhanced caching capabilities and increased I/O.

Compared to 12TB drives, the Exos X16 hard drives can deliver 33% additional storage per rack but keep the same small footprint – thereby reducing the overall TCO (total cost of ownership) in data center environments.

This hard drive has a built-in tool, Seagate Secure, helping you to perform instant and safe drive erasure for data protection.

The Seagate 16TB Exos hard drive features maximum 261MB/s sustained transfer rate and offers 170/440 IOPS of the random read/write 4K (QD16). Its MTBF (mean time between failures) is listed at 2,500,000 hours and offers a five-year warranty.

The Exos X series is available in two versions: SATA 6Gbps and SAS 12Gbps.

Seagate 16TB IronWolf Hard Drive

The IronWolf HDDs carry over their Rotational Vibration (RV) sensors. It is said that this can help the hard drive counteract vibrations in multi-bay enclosures. Besides, this HDD includes advanced power management features for NAS devices and also comes with the Rescue Data Recovery Service so that you can perform data recovery.

For the sustained transfer rate, it can reach up to 250MB/s. In addition, it features 256MB cache and 7200 RPM spindle speeds. Similarly, the IronWolf Pro HDD offers a 5-year warranty while IronWolf includes a 3-year warranty.

TDMR Will Push Capacities Further by 2025

Traditional magnetic recording technologies have pushed drive densities to the limit, so using the two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) technology can increase the disk capacity even more. This can extend the features of the traditional method, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, to increase capacity.

In addition, with TDMR technology plus the sealed helium design, hard drive makers can use narrower tracks and pitches to increase areal density.

According to Seagate, this process can produce not only 16TB disks but up to 100 TB hard drives by 2025. This raises capacity dramatically.

Final Words

Now, these Seagate 16TB Exos & IronWolf hard drives are available for purchase. And the Exos X16 HDD carries an MSRP of $629; the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro are priced at $160 and $665 respectively. If you are interested in these hard drives, just go to purchase one for data storage.