Seagate announced the production of 22TB drives a year ago, but distributed them only to selected partners. Until now it is will admit to regular sale and the IronWolf Pro model will be offered at a recommended price of $600 (CZK 17,300 with VAT) with a five-year warranty.
In the meantime, it was overtaken by competitor Western Digital, which offers 22TB HDDs in four different lines: Ultrastar (data centers), Gold (enterprises), Red Pro (NAS) and Purple Pro (video).
Like the competition, IronWolf Pro has 10 platters with a capacity of 2.2 TB. It rotates at 7200 revolutions per minute, uses a 512GB buffer memory and is connected via the SATA 600 interface. The sequential transfer speed is up to 285 MB/s, which is at the level of WD Gold.
Both rivals use conventional CMR/PMR write technology, not shingle SMR, where high capacities are traded for reduced performance. Seagate should soon build the first 24TB drive on it.
This year, however, it is also preparing a 30TB model, which will use the second generation of HAMR technology for laser heating of the track, which is the key to increasing the write density. HAMR should be sufficient up to a capacity of 100 TB, which the company expects for 2030.
The most popular HDD with a capacity of 20+ TB
Another popular HDD with a capacity of 20+ TB
Disk drives have already overtaken SSDs in terms of capacity. There are, for example, 30TB Samsung and Kioxia storage on the market, but they cost almost a quarter of a million crowns.
*A thousand Wikipedias in the caption refers to the fact that the compressed version of all texts takes up 21 GB.
