Seagate passes gassy 14TB whopper: He He He, one for each of you

Misses no one: PCs, NAS, workstations, enterprise, surveillance

Seagate has spread its 14TB, 7,200rpm helium-filled disk drive tech across the PC, NAS, enterprise capacity and surveillance market sectors.

A few years ago the idea of having a PC or workstation with a 14TB disk drive was fantasy. Dream no more: the 14TB helium-filled BarraCuda Pro (PDF) does cost about $580, though.

The drive adds 2TB capacity to the existing 12TB BarraCuda Pro, and like that drive spins at 7200rpm, has up to 256MB of cache, transfers data at up to 250MB/sec, uses a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, and has a five-year limited warranty.

Similarly, the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro NAS drives, which topped out at 12TB, now max out at 14TB. The Pro version has a higher workload rating than the standard IronWolf – 300TB/year instead of 180TB/year, and a five-year instead of a three-year warranty.

IronWolf Pro, supporting up to 24-bay NAS enclosures, capacity ranges from 2TB to 14B, while the ordinary IronWolf, supporting one- to 8-bay enclosures, goes from 1TB to 14TB.

The Exos X14 is an enterprise capacity-type drive, marketed by Seagate as a hyperscale and cloud storage medium, with a claimed sustained data transfer of up to 261MB/sec .

Seagate originally announced the 14TB Exos in March^*, and it's shipping now. The drive has a 256MB cache, and either a 6Gbit/s SATA or 12Gbit/s SAS interface. Capacities range from 1TB through to 14TB and it has a 550TB/year workload rating and an MTBF of 2.5 million hours.

It has a five-year warranty, always-on encryption and meets the FIPS 140-2, Level 2 Security certification and CC ISO/EIC 15408 compliance standards.

The Cupertino firm has built an Exos E 4U106 enclosure, stuffed with Exos X14 drives and having a maximum capacity of 1.4PB, equal to 100 X 14TB Exos X14s.

The fourth 14TB spinner is the SkyHawk surveillance drive – datasheet here (PDF). It has a 256MB cache, a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, transfers data at 220MB/sec, a three-year warranty and 180TB/year workload rating.

Toshiba has a 14TB NAS drive, the MN07, a 12Gbit/s SAS interface 14TB MG07SCA enterprise drive, a 6Gbit/s SATA 14TB MG07 disk.

WD looks to be behind the 14TB curve here, with its shingled 14TB Ultrastar HS14 enterprise capacity drive, with slower data re-write speed than non-shingled drives. WD has a non-shingled Ultrastar 14TB HC530 drive but its Purple surveillance drive tops out at 12TB. We expect a 14TB upgrade shortly as well as one for its Gold nearline, Red NAS and, maybe, Blue desktop drives.

Seagate’s IronWolf and IronWolf Pro 14TB are available at an MSRP of $529.99 and $599.99 respectively. The BarraCuda Pro 14TB is available at an MSRP of $579.99. The SkyHawk14TB is available at an MSRP of $509.99. The Exos X14 is available at an MSRP of $614.99. You can get datasheets from Seagate’s website. ®

* Not to blow our trumpet too loudly, but back then we wrote: “We might expect Seagate to introduce a desktop version of the Exos X14 in a month or few, like a 14TB Barracuda Pro. And then it has a couple of 12TB IronWolf NAS drives and 10TB SkyHawk surveillance disks.” Lo and behold this has come to pass.