Seagate Shipping Enormous 22TB Hard Drives to “Some Customers”

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/seagate-starts-shipping-enormous-22tb-hard-drives-to-some-customers/

Whereas NVMe SSDs tend to focus on getting faster, good old spinning hard drives are intent on getting larger. Tom's Hardware reports that hard drive manufacturer Seagate announced on a recent earnings call that it is shipping huge 22TB hard drives to some of its customers. The company uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to squeeze a couple more terabytes out of its biggest drives.

The highest-capacity drives most people can currently buy top out at 20TB; the Seagate Ironwolf Pro or WD Gold are two such drives, and they both generally retail for over $600. In its NAS drives, Seagate uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which provides better random read and write speeds than SMR disks but at a lower density—this is fine for archival storage but not so much for servers where multiple users are regularly accessing and modifying data. We found this out firsthand a few years back when Western Digital covertly started using SMR technology in its WD Red drives for consumer NAS devices.

Seagate starts shipping enormous 22TB hard drives to “some customers”

The biggest drives most people can buy top out at 20TB.

arstechnica.com