Seagate Boosts Hard Drives to 16TB With New IronWolf and Exos Models

With the worldwide data creation predicted to grow from 33 zettabytes to 175 zettabytes per year by 2025, incremental gains in hard drive density are a bit like putting fingers in the dike, but they are certainly always welcome and provide some breathing room. Seagate has now packed 16TB into 3.5-inch form factor Enterprise-grade drives. According to Seagate, these are the highest capacity hard drives ever produced.

Exos for Data Center, IronWolf for NAS

By 2020 HAMR Will Push Capacities Further

Traditional magnetic recording technology has pushed drive densities to the limit. With very-high-capacity devices, it isn’t possible to write only the bits desired, so additional data needs to be written as well — impacting performance. With HAMR, the bit to be written is heated using a laser diode, so that it is easier to write, and can be specifically targeted. The result, when combined with surrounding helium helps power predictions of drives up to 100TB by 2025. We got a demo of HAMR drives at CES, but they won’t be available until 2020.

Price and Availability

Seagate has been shipping some of the Exos drives to some of its enterprise customers for several months, to ensure that they can pass muster running vendor qualification tests and performance benchmarks including sg3_utils and smartmontools. The Exos 16TB drives are now generally available for purchase at an MSRP of $629, with the IronWolf version selling for $610 and the IronWolf Pro version for $665.

Continue reading

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Is Leaking into Space

NASA reports the probe grabbed so much regolith from the asteroid that it's leaking out of the collector. The team is now working to determine how best to keep the precious cargo from escaping.

SpaceX Launches ‘Better Than Nothing’ Starlink Beta

Those lucky few who have gotten invitations to try the service will have to pay a hefty up-front cost, and the speeds aren't amazing. Still, it's a new generation of satellite internet.

Hubble Examines 16 Psyche, the Asteroid Worth $10,000 Quadrillion

Researchers just finished an ultraviolet survey of 16 Psyche, the ultra-valuable asteroid NASA plans to visit in 2026.

ARMing for War: New Cortex-A78C Will Challenge x86 in the Laptop Market

ARM took another step towards challenging x86 in its own right with the debut of the Cortex-A78C this week. The new chip packs up to eight "big" CPU cores and up to an 8MB L3 cache.