Seagate's latest enterprise class hard drive offers up to 6TB of space in a 3.5" form factor. The Enterprise Capacity series drive comes in both SATA III 6Gbps and 12Gbps SAS interfaces. Seagate was able to achieve an impressive 1,000 Gb/inch or about 1.25 TB per platter with the drive's five total platters adding up to the 6TB capacity. Perhaps even more impressively, Seagate was able to offer up a 6TB, five platter, 7,200 RPM drive without using helium.
The 6TB Enterprise Capacity hard drive comes with a 128MB DRAM cache. It is rated at 216 MB/s for sequential transfer speeds and an average latency of 4.16 milliseconds. The drive also supports 256-bit AES encryption and an instant secure erase function which overwrites data multiple times. Seagate further claims the drive is rated for 24/7 workloads at 550TB/year with a MTBF of 1.4 million hours. The drive comes with a five year warranty.
The drive will come in several variants depending on the storage interface. LaCie has already committed to using the new drives in its dual bay external storage products. Seagate has not released pricing on the new 6TB drive, but stated that it would price the drive at the same $/GB as last year's 4TB model. Expect the price to be around $650 MSRP before contract and bulk order deals.
It is a neat drive for sure, and I hope that the technology trickles down to the consumer space quickly, as 4TB has been the maximum single drive capacity for far too long!
For now, the drive will be used in the datacenter, production house, and security/surveillance markets (particularly in the datacenter market where rack space is at a premium).
I don’t understand why these
I don’t understand why these drives are not hybrid, when of any drive they would benefit from it most at 6GB capacity…
With 6TB of space available,
With 6TB of space available, any flash / hybrid portion would be a very small fraction of the total space. In enterprise scenarios where the whole span is likely used, the chances of cache hits are very small. Additionally, enterprise hybrid solutions apply a larger / faster SSD as a cache of the entire array of HDDs, making things more efficient overall.
The SSHD model is not going
The SSHD model is not going to catch on IMO. HDD’s should stick to what they’re good at and not try and be different. With the rapidly expanding SSD sizes and prices dropping simultaneously, there are few cases I’d ever recommend someone going for a SSHD as some kind of “go-between”.
When I want reliable, long-term storage. I’ll go HDD every time. Until NAND gets its replacement that promises to make write cycles so large that it’ll be a past-time, I’ll never trust a SSD without constantly monitoring its endurance. Already in 6 months I’m down 10% on a 480GB Corsair Neutron drive and I don’t consider myself doing anything too outlandish.
Even if they could last a solid 8 years as SSDLife claims, if you see what happens when they die it isn’t pretty. You’ll probably scratch your head for a couple days, weeks, or months before you figure out the system instability is being caused by the endurance life running out.
Heres to going large and in charge! Can’t wait to see HAMR come into play! I will have a 4 disk 50TB NAS by the end of this decade I promise! 😀
Is there a home RAID system
Is there a home RAID system that will Raid 0 two or more drives for fast IO, then in the background and not using any system resources transfer the Raid 0 share to a seperate raid 1 share. Or is it just cheeper to use an SSD and baskup to a RAID 1, or other?
I think what you’re looking
I think what you’re looking for is RAID0+1 or RAID10.
When this hits the consumer
When this hits the consumer market, That enterprise warranty will dwindle down to 1year.
Seagates quality and faith in the longevity of their drives for the consumer is none existent. I don’t have the time to keep returning them, and then to take the loss when they fail at 14months, as past 1500 drives did.
It’s great to see 6TB drives
It’s great to see 6TB drives coming, I’m an adult entertainment photographer/videographer and we use 90TB RAID arrays at work with 3TB and 4TB drives. Hopefully with the new 6TB drives we’ll be able to squeeze more data in less space!