Seagate launched one other 22TB laborious disk drive for the enterprise market. The IronWolf Professional (ST22000NT001) has 10 platters and makes use of CMR (standard magnetic recording) slightly than the controversial SMR to achieve that capability. It has a 256MB cache and a 7200RPM rotational pace, which implies that it’s more likely to be one of many quickest HDD round.
What’s maybe extra essential to our readers although is that it’s optimized for NAS (community connected storage) units with a 5 yr guarantee, a 550TB/yr workload score, a bunch of proprietary options and a imply time earlier than failure of two.5M hours. Seagate’s advertising and marketing literature mentions “AgileArray with dual-plane balancing, time-limited error restoration (TLER), and rotational vibration (RV) sensors to ship high RAID efficiency in multi-bay environments”
Add a complimentary three-year rescue information restoration service, to defend you from a probably catastrophic machine failure and you’ve got a fairly compelling product for anybody trying to retailer massive quantities of information of any kind. Simply be sure you have a strong backup plan, both utilizing one of many greatest cloud backup suppliers or one of many greatest backup software program.
What seals the deal is the worth: at lower than $363 (or $16.50 per TB), it’s already the most cost effective massive capability drive (above 20TB) in the marketplace regardless of an MSRP of $600 and we wouldn’t be stunned if its value falls additional come Christmas or Black Friday. You too can purchase it proper now (opens in new tab) (which exhibits that there’s ample inventory)
The most cost effective 22TB Western Digital drive is the WD Purple Professional surveillance HDD (opens in new tab)at $438, which has a 20% premium. Apparently, if you need an exterior laborious drive of this capability, the WD Components desktop exterior laborious drive is considerably cheaper at $380 at Amazon (opens in new tab).
No 30TB drives but
Since Could 2022, Western Digital has the biggest laborious disk drive in the marketplace, the 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670, one which is barely accessible for information middle shoppers as a result of it’s host-managed drive that isn’t drop-in replacements for CMR HDDs (extra on that in our interview with WD’s Ravi Pendekanti, SVP of HDD Product Administration).
Seagate nonetheless has confirmed that it desires to launch a 30TB laborious disk drive by July 2023 for choose prospects, more likely to be primarily based on HAMR expertise. Toshiba, the third laborious disk drive vendor, has plans to launch a 30TB mannequin in 2024; how probably that’s to occur might additionally depend upon a comparatively unknown firm referred to as Resonac, a Japanese firm that produces the platters that go into laborious disk drives.
Resonac provided the two.6TB platters that WD used within the HC670 (10 of them per disk drive) and can produce fashions with a capability of no less than 3TB by the top of the yr (primarily based on a 2022 press launch). Enchancment in storage capability for laborious disk drives goes at a snail tempo as a result of the low hanging fruits are all gone. Aside from the capability of the platter, the one different variable that can be utilized is the variety of platters per drive.
The introduction of helium virtually a decade in the past helped transfer the needle from eight, to 9 after which 10 with the following step being 11. Past that, it’s all right down to how storage density or what number of bits could be crammed per sq. inch; the trade commonplace is at present round 1Tb per sq. inch.
