Seagate Announces Release of 12TB Enterprise HDD

Seagate introduced its newest enterprise-class hard disk drive at this weeks OCP summit and with it, they’re further strengthening their position in this market. The new drive provides you with 12TB capacity in a helium-filled 3.5-inch size.

When we think of the previous 10TB drives, the increase in capacity might not look like a lot at the first glance. But it is an increase in capacity of 20% and it isn’t that long ago that 2TB drives were the largest around. Now Seagate adds that to the already impressive 10TB Helium-filled drives. With these new drives, enterprises are able to create 10PB storage arrays in a single 42U rack. That’s impressive and it allows for up to 50% more petabytes per rack when compared to competing 8TB drives.

Capacity isn’t everything for storage; we also need performance and endurance. The new Seagate Enterprise 12TB Helium-filled HDDs feature the best response times for drives of this class and they can deliver a 20% better write performance than competitive air-based HDDs. In numbers, the drives deliver sustained speeds up to 261 MB/s and a random write performance up to 400 IOPS. There are both SATA and SAS version available, but there isn’t a direct performance difference between the two interface models. The drives are rated for a 550TB per year workload and come with an impressive 2.5 million hour MTBF.

The main improvements on the new series, as Seagate puts it themselves:

• Highly scalable hard drive storage that is rapidly deployable for maximum performance and energy efficiency for Open Compute Project platforms.
• 50 percent higher capacity, which enables hyper-scale customers to deploy over 10PB of high-performance storage in a single 42U rack for the first time – maintaining current space, weight, and power consumption profiles.
• 21 percent increase in IOPs performance/watt perfect for next generation eco-friendly infrastructures.
• 20 percent increase in enhanced caching performance, which results in faster access to unstructured data.

While these are enterprise drives and as such not the drives for most our readers, we all know that what starts in the enterprise sector eventually makes it to the consumer sector. It’s also worth noting that Seagate was selected by IT professionals for the 5th year in a row as Best-In-Class with their Enterprise drives.