Seagate announced this week the release of their new, larger IronWolf Pro hard drives with a whopping 24TB capacity. This reflects a somewhat slow pace in the evolution of hard drive capacity growth. For comparison, we discussed the Seagate Exos IronWolf Pro 20TB model two years prior. Displaying a 20% increase in only two years signifies slow development within the tech industry.
The Launch of the Seagate IronWolf Pro 24TB CMR Hard Drives
Here’s a summary of the main specifications of the new release:
Interestingly, Seagate explicitly indicates that each IronWolf Pro unit is a CMR drive, not an SMR drive. This CMR disk rotates at 7.2k RPM and delivers a maximum sustained transfer rate of 285MB/s. As with the previous 22TB model, this one too features a 512MB cache drive. Strikingly, we have now reached a point where the largest cache drive on CMR hard drives is smaller than a contemporary CPU’s L3 cache.
Concerning its reliability, the 2.5M hour MTBF is a strong point, although the nonrecoverable read errors per bits read is rated at 1 in 10^15, which is notably inferior to a current SSD’s 1 in 10^17. Moreover, a limit of 550TB per year for the workload rate is not particularly high. It translates to roughly 23 drive reads/writes annually, well below the average of an SSD.
Concluding Thoughts
Inherently, one of the primary advantages of larger drives is their ability to offer more storage in the same physical space and nearly the same power budget. Hence, the emergence of 24TB drives is a commendable development. It is speculated that the list price will be around $649, which seems a tad high when compared to existing drives like the WD Gold 24TB, priced at $629. Generally speaking, one would expect a newer drive with comparable specs to not be more expensive.
However, given the current pricing of drives and the gradual pace of innovation, it’s evident that this market, plagued by decades of mergers, suffers from a noticeable absence of competition.
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