Seagate’s inaugural Datasphere 2020 conference provided the perfect opportunity for the storage giant to unveil some exciting new products and technologies.
And the firm duly delivered, confirming what we all wanted to know: that the world’s biggest hard disk drive, the Exos 20+ (opens in new tab), will launch in December 2020.
The internal HDD will be the first to come with HAMR technology (which boosts capacity) and MACH2 actuator technology, designed to maintain performance SLA as capacity scales to the 50TB (opens in new tab).
- At 18TB, this is the largest internal hard disk drive around: the Seagate IronWolf Pro (opens in new tab)
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- At 100TB, this is the largest solid state drive right now: the Nimbus Data Exadrive (opens in new tab)
Dr. Dave Mosley, the CEO of Seagate, also dropped in two particularly interesting slides, the first of which shows a TCO saving of nearly a third (opens in new tab) when storing 1PB on 18TB, compared to 8TB.
The second showed the relative price per PB (opens in new tab) when using a 20TB HAMR, compared to a 50TB version, and demonstrated that the rapid and continuous adoption of the highest-capacity hard drives by hyperscalers delivers a "sustained cost advantage".
With that in mind, Seagate has also launched CORTX - an open-source S3-compatible object storage software-defined storage platform - as well as a reference architecture called Lyve Drive rack that can deliver up to 106 drives (or 2.12PB) per rack node.
Earlier this month, both Seagate and WD launched 18TB hard disk drives (opens in new tab) based on CMR and PMR technologies. It will be interesting to see whether cloud backup (opens in new tab) specialist BackBlaze (opens in new tab) uses these latest high capacity drives for its popular cloud storage (opens in new tab) service, giving us early feedback on performance and reliability.
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