Seagate Announces Exos and IronWolf 16 TB Helium Hard Drives

Seagate today launches its 16R CMR (conventional magnetic recording) helium readers under two product lines – the Exos X for the use of the data center, and the IRONWOLF / IronWolf Pro for NAS units. The company is actively shipping Exos X to very large-scale customers, and today's launch is more focused on the retail market. Similar to the currently available 14 TB Seagate drives, the new 16 TB variants also use TDMR (two-dimensional magnetic recording) technology for heads.

The Exos X16 is a 7200rpm 3.5 "drive with SED (Automatic Encryption Drive) options and is currently the primary available capacity point for all hard drive vendors. but it's not the first publicly announced 16TB drive – this credit goes to Toshiba's MG08 series launched in January 2019. Similar to Toshiba's MG08 series, Seagate 16TB drives also use nine trays to reach the point of ability.

Seagate says the new Exos X16 provides 33% more storage per rack compared to 12TB variants – reducing total cost of ownership for data center operators. The Exos X series is available in SATA 6 Gbps and SAS 12 Gbps versions.

16TB discs are also available under the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro brands. These drives have a nominal working capacity of 300 TB / year and offer the benefits typically required by NAS SOHO / SMB systems.

The Exos X16 16GB Hard Drive SATA model (ST16000NM001G) has a MSRP of $ 629 and is available for purchase today. The two-port SAS model (ST16000NM002G) is priced at $ 639. The detailed specifications of the different variants of Exos X16 are reproduced in the table below.

The IronWolf Pro (ST16000NE000) has a MSRP of $ 665 and the IronWolf (ST16000VN001) is priced at $ 610. These templates are provided with the data recovery service. The detailed specifications are presented in the table below. The IronWolf 16 TB drive is designed for loading / unloading cycles of 600 K €. The corresponding figures for Exos X16 and IronWolf Pro were not provided.

Seagate may not be the first to publicly announce a 16 TB hard drive. However, there is no sign of the previously announced Toshiba MG08 series in the retail market. Seagate 16TB drives are available for purchase today.