Today Seagate Technology announced that it was releasing a higher capacity version of several of its drives. The drives will now top out at 8TB and this new capacity will be available for the Enterprise Capacity 3.5”, Enterprise NAS, and Kinetic HDD. Increasing the capacity of these drives gives businesses of all sizes the ability to increase capacity and potentially decrease footprint while giving them the same performance and reliability they’ve come to expect from Seagate.
Today Seagate Technology announced that it was releasing a higher capacity version of several of its drives. The drives will now top out at 8TB and this new capacity will be available for the Enterprise Capacity 3.5”, Enterprise NAS, and Kinetic HDD. Increasing the capacity of these drives gives businesses of all sizes the ability to increase capacity and potentially decrease footprint while giving them the same performance and reliability they’ve come to expect from Seagate.
Currently the only non-SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives on the market is HGST’s helium filled He8 drives. With the exception of the Kinetic HDD, the other drives being announced still used traditional, test and validated, HDD technology. Seagate also stated that they are not yet using helium in their drives, just getting a little more capacity per disk.
We had previously reviewed Seagate’s 6TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5” and found that at the time it had top in class sequential transfer speeds. The new version of the drive uses the same technology as the previous 9 generations, with a 33% increase in capacity, and Seagate is claiming the new drive will deliver 100% increase in random read/write performance. The new Enterprise Capacity drive also comes with double the cache size with 256MB.
The Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD is another drive that we tested its 6TB version and found it to be a very high performing. Seagate’s NAS drives are specifically designed to work in NAS environments. Using the same technology and firmware, the new drives give business the ability to add more capacity within their existing NAS devices or the ability to keep current capacity using less drives and therefore having a smaller footprint.
The Kinetic Open Storage platform simplifies large-scale storage architectures by eliminating the overhead of an entire storage server tier. These fewer number of storage servers reduces power consumption and headcount expenses associated with managing storage, resulting in lower operating costs. The Kinetic Open Storage platform also improves drive and rack level performance by removing the need for legacy file systems and moving HDD storage media space management to the drive itself. Ultimately this offers a streamlined architecture, allowing storage applications to communicate directly with the Kinetic object storage HDDs. As a result, performance is enhanced by eliminating storage server bottlenecks due to direct IP addressing each drive, which improves system level throughput. The increase in capacity size will further lower TCO by giving higher capacity in a lower footprint.
Availability
Seagate is currently sampling all the drives with select customers and expects the drives to be available later this year.
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