Seagate: 32 TB hard drives for NAS and servers
New versions of the Exos, Ironwolf Pro, and Skyhawk AI series, like their predecessors, store data in CMR format, but their capacity increases to 32 terabytes.
(Image: Seagate)
Hard drive manufacturer Seagate is packing data even more densely into its hard drives: instead of 30 TB, 32 TB now fit into the same 3.5-inch enclosures. Seagate uses its HAMR technology for this, where tiny lasers in the total of 20 read/write heads heat the surface shortly before the actual writing process so intensely that the magnetic particles on the platters can be remagnetized with very little energy.
According to Seagate, the new capacity level will be available from authorized distributors starting tomorrow, in the form of the Exos (server), Ironwolf Pro (NAS), and Skyhawk AI (video recording) drive series. Exos and Ironwolf Pro were already released in the summer of last year with 30 TB of storage space, while the Skyhawk AI was only available with 24 TB recently, meaning without HAMR technology.
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As usual, the differences between the individual models lie almost exclusively in the firmware. All drives have ten platters and 512 MB of cache rotate at 7200 revolutions per minute; only values for the Ironwolf Pro are available regarding power consumption. This is said to consume 8.3 watts during operation, and Seagate states the power consumption in idle mode as 6.8 watts. All drives have vibration sensors, with the help of which the firmware can correct the deviations that inevitably occur in larger arrays.
The prices for the drives are 902 euros for Exos and Skyhawk AI, while Seagate charges 917 euros for the Ironwolf Pro. The warranty is five years; for the first three years, free data recovery is included for the Ironwolf Pro and Skyhawk AI models. Seagate states the success rate for this as 95 percent – a backup is certainly more sensible.
HAMR technology
A detailed explanation of HAMR technology can be found in the article How manufacturers are squeezing more and more bits into enclosures. The only remaining competitors, Toshiba and Western Digital, have not yet included drives with HAMR recording in their product range but have been working on it for some time. Both currently rely on a hard drive design with eleven platters, and Toshiba has already shown one with twelve platters. However, both use technologies with energy support, FC-MAMR (Toshiba) and ePMR (Western Digital), respectively.
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