Seagate introduces world-first 16TB Exos HDD and IronWolf NAS drives

Today (June 4, 2019), Seagate releases new hard drives for professional- or server-grade applications. They are the Exos X16, new IronWolf and new IronWolf Pro products. They exceed the company's top-end storage options in that they are all 16TB in capacity.

The Seagate Exos X16 is a 3.5 7200rpm drive. However, it is also helium-based, and can transfer 1.3 times more petabytes per rack than a comparable 12TB product. Therefore, Seagate has crowned the X16 an industry-leader in its enterprise-focused area. It is joined at launch by the IronWolf 16TB and IronWolf Pro 16TB. These NAS-type drives push new boundaries in server capacity, even in the home or office.

Then again, Seagate also asserts that these drives can also support multiple server-users simultaneously, and can handle a load of up to 300TB per year. The company has made this leap in order to keep up with the storage demands of the future: it estimates that this will grow from the current approximate 33 zettabytes (ZB; 2018 figures) to 175 ZB in 6 years.

In the meantime, Tencent Cloud also makes the announcement that it has already taken up and incorporated Exos X16s into its own concerns. This drive has a recommended price of US$629 and is available now. However, the 16TB IronWolf drives are not on sale at yet.