A 16TB hard disk drive is on sale for far less than you'd think

Storage giant Seagate unveiled two new hard disk drives with a 16TB capacity earlier this year and for once, it was not all about data centers. 

The Exos X16 and the IronWolf/IronWolf Pro targeted two different audiences (data center for the first and NAS users for the second) and feature SATA or SAS interface only for the first one and SATA only for the second model.

Provantage is selling the Exos (ST16000NM001G) for just over $400 while the IronWolf one (ST16000VN001) retails for just under $500 from Amazon.

Both have nine platters, use Helium technology and have a five year warranty (the IronWolf has three); they also share the s same spinning speed (7200RPM), idle power (5W), average latency (4.16ms) and cache (256MB). 

The Exos range carries a MTBF (mean time before failures) at 2.5M hours and boasts a higher sustained transfer rate at 261MBps; the IronWolf Pro and the IronWolf reach 250 and 210MBps respectively. Note that the IronWolf Pro also comes with bundled Rescue Services, great for data recovery.

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Toshiba announced the 16TB MG08 series in January 2019 but we have yet to see any stock in the channel. Western Digital also shipped its first 16TB hard disk drives as well but based on MAMR rather than HAMR technology - as used by Seagate.

While SSD prices have been falling, they are still far more expensive than their hard disk drive counterparts. At about $2800, Micron’s 9300 Pro is nearly SEVEN times more expensive although this gap has all but disappeared for sub-1TB capacities.

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