Number two of hard disk drives, Seagate, launching new product line of hard disks targeting enterprise NAS devices with up to 16 disks. The principal competitor , WD with their line of WD Red were only available for NAS devices having up to 4 HDDs. Enterprise NAS HDD From Seagate shall have more capacity and larger cache (p to 128mb).
Seagate announced yesterday the launch of a new range of hard drives called “Enterprise NAS HDD”, optimized for storage servers with 8 to 16 bays. Enterprise NAS HDD are capable by reducing vibration to prevent reactions in chain, and therefore versions offering greater longevity for servers with up to 16 bays.
The disks are standard 7200 RPM drives with the right balance of features imported from both the NAS HDD as well as Enterprise Capacity lineups.
What are the differences between the Seagate and WD disks?
- Maximum capacity (6 TB for the Enterprise NAS HDD vs. 4 TB for the Red Pro)
- Cache size (128 MB in the Enterprise NAS HDD vs. 64 MB in the WD Red Pro)
- Slightly better MTBF (1.2M for the Enterprise NAS HDD vs. 1M for the Red Pro)
- Bundled data recovery service (not available for WD Red Pro)
- RV Sensor for detecting and compensating for vibrational disturbances
The drives operate at 7200 rpm and thus reach 210 MB / s sequential. They are guaranteed for 5 years instead of 3. Prices and launch dates of these Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD were not disclosed. WD Red Pro 2, 3 and 4 TB were started at 150, 180 and 240 euros.
Source: Seagate PR
There is still enterprise market for spinning disks, however the market share will get smaller and will dissapear at the end. In less than 10 years time spinning disks will be history. Perhaps for some archiving solution there still might be a usage, but even that will gets replaced.
We will look what we call today “the spinning rust” in museums. The devices will still exists, but the price of SSDs will be lower compared to identical capacity, so nobody will want to buy spinning disks as they have only disadvantages:
- Generate heat
- They are noisy
- They have slow access
- They consume way more electricity than SSDs!
The future is in SSDs. The SATA/SAS or PCIE will evolve into something called NVMe. That's the near future: 6.4 TB of Data on Single SSD Backed by Internal RAID – Upcoming model of NVMe SSD from OCZ
