Seagate made the announcement today that it is shipping a trio of 16TB drives. The Seagate Exos X16 16TB is targeted for the enterprise segment. For the NAS segment, there is the IronWolf 16TB and IronWolf Pro 16TB.
Seagate Exos X16 16TB Hard Drive
The Seagate Exos X16 is a helium-based 16TB hard drive with a 7200rpm spindle rate. At $629 list price per drive, the Seagate Exos X16 16TB HDD offers higher density per rack which can result in TCO savings. Here are the key specs:
One can see the 2.5M hour MTBF and sustained transfer speeds of up to 261MB/s for both the SATA and SAS3 versions of the drive.
The Seagate Exos X16 also supports features like the Seagate Secure Instant Secure Erase in this family. That feature allows drives to be erased quickly and retired from production, much like modern SSDs can be. One does not need to use a lengthy drive erasure procedure to ensure data is not recoverable. Some organizations would otherwise need to destroy drives after use, making this a “green” feature for drive recycling.
Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB and IronWolf 16TB
These drives were in the announcement today, but the spec sheets and product pages were not updated. Seagate IronWolf hard drives are generally intended for smaller NAS units while Seagate IronWolf Pro hard drives are targeted at larger NAS units.
Like the rest of the line, we expect that both of these models are SATA III 6.0gbps drives. We also expect that the Seagate IronWolf 16TB drive will come with a 3-year warranty and the Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB will come with a 5-year warranty and two years of included data recovery services with drive registration.
We may come back and update this piece if Seagate decides to update their IronWolf pages with the new products like they did on the Exos side.
