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Seagate 12TB Enterprise Capacity hard drive pushes 42U rack capacity to 10PB

For the first time, hyperscale customers will be able to deploy over 10PB of high-performance storage in a single 42U rack.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor
Seagate unveils 12TB Enterprise Capacity hard drive

Seagate's 12TB Enterprise Capacity hard drive

Seagate

Server storage getting a bit tight? Seagate's new 12TB Enterprise Capacity helium-filled drive might be just what you need.

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Seagate's new drop-in replacement 12TB drive allows cloud providers and OEMs to cope with the ever-growing amounts of data that hyperscale customers need to store and have access to, while at the same time keeping total cost of ownership (TCO) concerns to a minimum.

Highlights

  • Highly scalable hard drive storage that is rapidly deployable for maximum performance and energy efficiency for Open Compute Project (OCP) platforms
  • 4.16ms average latency
  • 24x7 use and five-year warranty
  • Encryption option
  • Robust sealed-drive architecture
  • 256MB cache (compared to 128MB for Seagate's 10TB Enterprise Capacity drive)
  • 550TB/year workload rating -- ten times the workload rating of desktop drives
  • Industry's best MTBF rating at 2.5M hours
  • 6Gb/s SATA or 12Gb/s SAS interface options
  • Excellent IOPS/TB storage for unstructured data
  • Up to 21 percent improvement in IOPS/watt over similar 12TB HDDs on the market
  • 0.5 watts less power than other drives, equating to approximately a 6 percent savings for a 10PB solution
  • 10 grams lighter per drive, or approximately a 2 percent weight reduction in a 10PB rack-based solution

Cloud providers will begin getting volume shipments of the drive for production availability in the June quarter.

But Seagate isn't standing still and has plans to release 14TB and 16TB helium-filled drives over the next year to 18 months, with 20TB drives landing in 2020.

See also:

How good can hard drives get? IBM hits 1 bit per atom:

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