Seagate Boosts Hard Drives to 16TB With New IronWolf HAMR 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 employed its HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology to pack 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

HAMR Makes the New Drives Possible

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, is not just these 16TB drives. When combined with additional advanced technologies like multiple actuators, it allows helps power predictions of drives up to 100TB by 2025.

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.

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