World’s largest hard disk drive goes on sale today for less than you’d think

16TB HDD for just over $590

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Storage colossusSeagatehas unveiled two new hard disk drives with a 16TB capacity and for once, it’s not all about data centers.

The Exos X16 and the IronWolf/IronWolf Pro target two different audiences (data center for the first and NAS users for the second) and feature SATA or SAS interface only for the first one and SATA only for the second model.

Provantage is selling theExos(ST16000NM001G) for just over $620 while theIronWolfone (ST16000VN001) retails for around $590 from Connection.

Both have nine platters, use Helium technology and have a five year warranty (the IronWolf has three); they also share the s same spinning speed (7200RPM), idle power (5W), average latency (4.16ms) and cache (256MB).

The Exos range carries a MTBF (mean time before failures) at 2.5M hours and boasts a higher sustained transfer rate at 261MBps; the IronWolf Pro and the IronWolf reach 250 and 210MBps respectively. Note that the IronWolf Pro also comes with bundled Rescue Services, great for data recovery.

More 16TB goodness to come

Toshiba announced the 16TBMG08series in January 2019 but we have yet to see any stock in the channel. Western Digital is also on track to ship its first 16TB hard disk drives as well but based on MAMR rather than HAMR technology - as used by Seagate.

While SSD prices have been falling, they are still far more expensive than their hard disk drive counterparts. At about $2800, Micron’s 9300 Pro is nearly five times more expensive although this gap has all but disappeared for sub-1TB capacities.

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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

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