Players who need large-capacity storage space can finally no longer have to work hard to piece together hard drives to save data. Seagate, the global leader in sustainable large-capacity data storage solutions, launches two 24TB hard drive models at once: IronWolf Pro 24TB for NAS devices and Exos X24, an enterprise-level solution, satisfying creators, individual players, and small studios at once , or even enterprise-level rack-mounted hard drives.
I believe that most players have this experience to some extent: they have many small hard drives at hand, and it is troublesome to plug them all into the computer. When installing a NAS, they have to worry about the security issues of various RAID modes. If RAID is not installed, the storage continuity of the same type of data is easily interrupted. Not only does it take a lot of effort to allocate data to different hard disk storage, but fragmented space will always be generated, which is very wasteful.
Take the simplest example. Assume that a 10TB hard drive has used 9 TB of space. At this time, 2TB of data is coming in. In order to facilitate management, it is likely to be placed in the new hard drive, and the old hard drive is The 1TB remaining space on the disk will have to be filled with suitable data later.
Therefore, experienced players will choose to buy a large-capacity hard drive directly. Not only is the power efficiency ratio high, but there is no need to move files around all day long. It can also save a lot of wiring trouble and chassis size. consumption.
So, how many TB is the largest hard drive currently on the retail market? It was originally Seagate’s 22TB, but now it is usurped by Seagate’s own 24TB product.
Yes! Seagate, a major hard disk manufacturer, has always been in a leading position in the layout of mechanical hard disks in addition to solid-state hard disks that are often at the forefront of performance. At present, Seagate’s internal hard drives are mainly divided into three parts: enterprise use, professional use and personal use. This time we will introduce the Exos X24 for enterprise use and the IronWolf Pro 24TB for professional use.
Solid-state hard drives have become popular in recent years, but in terms of single-disc capacity and cost, they are still far behind mechanical hard drives. You might as well think about it. 3.5-inch internal hard drives have been around for decades. In 2015, an 8TB hard drive was released with the same size. Now one can store up to 24TB of data. Its mechanical complexity, precision, and reading and writing technology , The magnetic recording density of the disc is astonishingly high.
▲ How to prevent two components that are 2 nanometers apart from colliding? This shows that its manufacturing precision is high.
Also because mechanical hard drives are extremely high-precision devices, reliability is crucial in order to be able to carry a hard drive with such a capacity in order to withstand the test of time. Before the hard drive leaves the factory, Seagate conducts more than 160 tests to ensure the operational stability of the hard drive, such as:
Temperature test
The ideal server operating temperature is 22~23 degrees Celsius. Generally, the operating temperature of a personal computer or NAS is difficult to exceed 40 degrees Celsius. Seagate tested the hard drive in an environment of 75 degrees Celsius. What is 75 degrees Celsius? If a solid-state drive reaches this temperature, it will basically start to run at a lower frequency. The recommended operating temperature of general storage devices is below 60 degrees Celsius. Seagate has set the test standard very high.
Humidity test
The humidity in Taiwan is not low all year round. Although the hard drive is not so fragile that it will die after a few rains, hard drives with poor moisture resistance will indeed affect their lifespan in the long run, and there are not many cases of hard drives failing due to moisture.
Air pressure test
Although it is said that the average player does not need to carry hard drives to the mountains and seas nowadays, Seagate still took the hard drives to an altitude of 12,200 meters for testing. This is almost the limit cruising altitude of ordinary civil aircraft, ensuring that it will not be affected during air transportation. Hard drive operation.
Resonance test
The rotation speed of the hard disk is very high, 7,200 rpm is equivalent to a speed of 128 kilometers per hour. When many hard disks are placed in a high-density chassis, it is difficult to ensure that they will not affect each other. Therefore, Seagate uses extremely stringent hard drive and chassis densities to test reliability. If the hard drive is to be placed in a NAS, it will definitely not be a problem.
Crash test
The working principle of a mechanical hard disk is to use a read-write head to change the data on the disc. How close is the read/write head to the disk? The answer is two nanometers, only one fifty thousandth of a hair. Therefore, its anti-collision ability needs to be adjusted to prevent it from being damaged by a slight collision.
Noise test
The noise generated by mechanical hard drives is no longer just a question of whether it is noisy or not. How to operate in a high-precision operating environment without sound pressure affecting its stability and causing errors is also a key point of the test.
▲ The hard drive is tested in a higher-level environment than a recording studio, and the rigor is evident. (Original image source: Seagate)
More and more players are beginning to adopt more professional hard drive specifications. For this reason, Seagate has also upgraded the NAS-specific IronWolf Pro. These two indicators can directly illustrate the value of this hard drive: 550TB WRL (workload limit, previous generation 330TB) and an MTBF (mean time to failure) of 2.5 million hours, compared with 1.2 million hours for the previous generation.
It can be a bit boring to delve too much into the technical details, so let’s take the 550TB WRL as an example. WRL refers to the amount of data that can be “written” in a year, while reading is not affected. 550TB divided by 365 days in a year, 1.5TB of data can be written in one day, which is much higher than the amount of data that the average player is likely to generate.
▲ Comparison table of Seagate’s consumer hard drives shows that IronWolf Pro’s specifications have jumped significantly.
Built-in RV vibration sensing
Hard drives are afraid of being dropped and shaken. RV vibration sensing allows IronWolf Pro to be unaffected by vibrations during operation, preventing interruption or loss of data reading and writing.
IronWolf Health Management health screening services, from prevention to recovery
Most NAS devices support this feature to monitor possible failures instead of waiting until the situation is serious to know that the hard drive is broken.
real.Hard drive rescue service
No matter how advanced the manufacturing technology of the hard drive is, what everyone is concerned about is what to do if it unfortunately fails. If the warranty is just broken, it is too easy to replace it with a new one. Seagate is the only brand on the market to provide rescue services once every three years. Testing fees are waived and data is retrieved by overseas laboratories. The success rate is as high as 90%.
Not only is it stable, but its performance is also impressive.
Although IronWolf Pro is a professional-grade hard drive in terms of specifications, technology, and sincerity, there is nothing wrong with plugging it into a personal computer. In fact, IronWolf Pro is suitable for frequent reading and writing, and BarraCuda is suitable for entry-level backup needs.
This time we plugged IronWolf Pro directly into the computer and into the NAS to see its performance.
▲ The 7200RPM IronWolf Pro supports all detection functions.
Players who have not been exposed to mechanical hard drives for a long time may underestimate its performance. Let’s take the CrystalDiskMark and see that the sequential read and write results are over 270MB per second. The upper limit of SATA SSD is only 560MB/s. IronWolf Pro can already reach half the speed, but the storage capacity is a huge difference.
Judging from the ATTO Disk Benchmark, the data reading and writing speed tends to be stable starting from 8KB. In terms of writing performance of small blocks, mechanical hard drives are actually not bad.
Using GoPro video clips to test the reading speed of real files, it can reach 268.9 MB/s, which is enough to read 8K H.265 images.
Likewise, when testing writing, the results are just as good as reading. This means that if you want to edit videos from consumer-grade cameras or video cameras, IronWolf Pro 24TB can easily handle it.
▲ Directly access the audio and video data in the hard drive for editing, it’s a piece of cake!
In the internal testing part of the NAS, the performance is close to 300MB/s, which is almost the limit of consumer 7,200-rpm hard drives. If players’ computers, shared devices, and NAS all have 2.5Gb interfaces, they can make good use of high-speed network bandwidth; if they only have 1Gb interfaces, then the speed of the hard drive can be said to be higher than the network speed.
Of course, it is also fully compatible with the NAS’s hard drive health management tool. In fact, NAS manufacturers will actively cooperate with hard disk manufacturers in this part, so there is no need to worry about NAS and hard disks being unfamiliar with it.
In the past few years, solid-state hard drives have been so popular that it is easy for people to forget the advantages of mechanical hard drives. The average player actually only needs the random access performance of a solid-state drive, and the need for large bandwidth does not appear often. Random access is mainly used for system disks. As for backup, cold data, and larger file collections, mechanical hard disks are actually very sufficient in terms of “feeling speed”, not to mention that the cost per unit capacity is still very high. Competitiveness.
The simplest way to judge: evaluate how much data you will generate in a day. If it is 300MB, then IronWolf Pro can write it in one or two seconds, and its capacity advantage is far greater than the speed value of solid-state drives.
There is no need to go into details about the advantages of large-capacity hard drives. The greatest sense of security that IronWolf Pro gives people is the effort that Seagate has made in its operational stability. This is also another factor besides capacity when purchasing mechanical hard drives. A point of consideration. In terms of the warranty policy, the only option is to exchange the old for a new one. Instead, the data rescue service, which was originally expensive, is provided free of charge. After all, isn’t it the reason why everyone is looking for a mechanical hard drive to store files with peace of mind?
24TB is an astonishing number for personal applications, but when will it become insufficient? Hard to say. You may not be a Youtuber who shoots a bunch of videos every day, but if we zoom in, we can now get an amazing fact.
In fact, if we include all the hard drives on the planet, there is currently not enough storage space. Statistics indicate that from 2024 to 2025 alone, 30ZB of data will be generated, but the storage space that can be created is only 2ZB (about 2 billion 1 TB hard drives).
This number is not shocking. With the explosive growth of AI, everything will be recorded and become big data. Future applications such as the metaverse and virtual and real integration will require massive storage as the basis. The storage capacity will become higher and higher, but the physical volume of the storage device will become smaller and smaller, which means that the storage density will become higher and higher.
One day, everything and every moment in the entire universe will become data that can be stored, but energy, physical space, and monetary costs are limited. How to record data more efficiently without consuming unlimited resources? Seagate’s Mozaic 3+™ hard drive platform is designed to solve this problem.
The Mozaic 3+™ platform technology uses nanophoton laser technology to write the magnetic head with plasma, precisely heat it to 426 degrees Celsius on the “superlattice platinum alloy” disc, and then rapidly cool it within 2 nanoseconds, making it stable. Store data to achieve heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). These terms, which sound like they could only appear in science fiction movies, have been actually used in Seagate Exos product lines of 30TB and above. Data centers are also gradually replacing Seagate large-capacity hard drives to cope with the explosive growth of data volume today and in the future. .
In addition, sustainability is a top priority for citizens of the world. Compared with traditional 16TB PMR hard drives, 30TB Mozaic 3+™ hard drives can reduce physical carbon emissions per TB by 55% and reduce power consumption by 40% per TB. % to help achieve the country’s sustainable development goals. Major hard disk manufacturers continue to push up capacity and density. Have we ever imagined that we can pick up a capacity of more than 30TB with one hand? In the past, that was the combined capacity of dozens of cabinets. In the world of data, we still have Can we say that mechanical hard drives are not important?
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