Seagate has joined Western
Digital’s previously exclusive 6TB hard drive club, with the
enterprise-class 7,200 RPM ST6000NM0004. Priced at around $600 (similar
to WD’s Ultrastar He6), Seagate’s new drive isn’t likely to find a home
in your gaming rig or office workstation — but that’s not really the
point of ultra-high-end hardware, anyway. No, the main reason you should
be excited about Seagate’s 6TB drive is that the technology that makes
such capacities possible will trickle down to mainstream drives,
resulting in cheaper 4TB desktop drives, and hopefully the arrival of
2.5-inch 3TB laptop hard drives.
Late last year, Western Digital’s HGST (Hitachi) subsidiary announced that it had squeezed seven platters into a single 3.5-inch hard drive,
for a total capacity of 6TB. This was only possible, apparently,
because it had finally worked out how to commercialize hermetically
sealed, helium-filled drives. Helium is thinner than air, meaning the
platters meet less resistance, meaning they generate less heat and
consume less power. Helium-filled hard drives, in my opinion, are one of
the most important innovations in storage technology ever. For now,
though, helium tech remains the exclusive reserve of the
enterprise-class (high-price) Ultrastar He6 — the tech will trickle down
eventually, but not yet.
Now, Seagate appears to have
crammed 6TB into a single hard drive without resorting to extreme
platter counts. Seagate hasn’t announced the exact number of platters,
but we believe it has six (1TB per platter, which is in-line with its
current, lower-capacity drives). What isn’t clear is how
Seagate has suddenly managed to get six platters into a 3.5-inch
enclosure. Presumably something else changed, but Seagate is keeping mum
on the matter. Importantly, it appears that Seagate’s 6TB drive still
uses conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), rather than
its new shingled magnetic recording (SMR)
that it said would be coming to market in 2014. This is a good thing,
as SMR is reportedly slower than PMR for write operations. (Read: Who makes the most reliable hard drives?)
As far as pricing and availability goes, we have no hard data from Seagate, other than it’s “currently shipping.” Some component websites already list the ST6000NM0004 at around $600, but they’re out of stock. The WD Ultrastar He6, despite being released a while ago, is actually very hard to find online (at the time of publishing, I couldn’t find it anywhere). As we alluded to at the start of the story, though, the pricing and availability of these monster drives isn’t really significant — much more important is the fact that Seagate and WD are continuing to increase the storage density of hard drives, which in turn will drive down the cost of consumer-grade 3- and 4TB drives. We have been waiting a long, long time for 2.5-inch 3TB drives, too — hopefully Seagate’s non-helium breakthrough means we’re almost there.
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