February 13th, 2020 by Alex Schuchter
WD Red 14TB NAS HDD Review
Western Digital released a new line of Red NAS drives in November of 2019 and among the newly launched drives a 14TB HDD was released; expanding the maximum capacity for the line’s HDDs. Purpose built for NAS system compatibility WD Red (non-pro) drives are ideal for home and small business NAS systems with up to 8 bays running in a 24/7 environment while supporting up to a 180 TB/year workload rate.
December 23rd, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Western Digital Sampling 20TB SMR & 18TB CMR HDDs
Western Digital (WDC) announced that it is shipping high capacity HDDs are sampling with enterprise OEM and hyperscale partners. These new HDDs include the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDDs and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs. These HDD’s were announced in September of this year.
December 3rd, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Seagate Exos 2X14 Doubles IOPS For Microsoft
Seagate has a new HDD that leverages its MACH.2 multi-actuator technology, the Exos 2X14. While the technology was announced two years ago with the promise of doubling throughput, Seagate, along with its customer Microsoft, are able to show results of the technology and its performance breakthroughs. The technology is beneficial to applications such as content delivery networks (CDNs), video streaming, mail servers, backup/shuttle services, Hadoop, and cloud applications and is being tested for data center deployment now.
October 25th, 2019 by Lyle Smith
Western Digital Announces New WD Red NAS Drives
Western Digital has announced several new storage products designed for small businesses and home offices that use NAS solutions. Among the launched drives is the company’s first-ever WD Red SSD and a 14TB addition to the WD Red and WD Red Pro HDD lines.
September 3rd, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Western Digital Announced 18TB CMR & 20TB SMR HDDs For 2020
Today Western Digital (WDC) announced that is has begun accelerate the development its nine-disk mechanical platform and leveraged energy-assisted recording technology in or to deliver the highest capacity HDDs yet. The company stat that it will have a 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDD and a 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDD sampling to select customers by the end of the year with larger production aimed at the first half of 2020. These new massive capacity HDD’s will be aimed at OEM and hyperscale data center customers.
August 10th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Seagate Exos X16 16TB HDD Review
Seagate continues to expand the capacity of their HDDs with the launch of the Exos X16 family earlier this year. As the second name implies, the capacity of these drives runs up to 16TB. The massive capacity in a 3.5” form factor can supply up to 33% more petabytes per rack, compared to 12TB drives. This would make the Exos X16 an ideal choice for hyperscale applications/cloud data centers, scale-out data centers, Big Data applications, and distributed files systems such as Hadoop and Ceph. The drives also have a 14TB version available.
July 24th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Western Digital Adds 10TB To Its Ultrastar DC HC300 Family
Recently, Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced that it was expanding its Ultrastar DC HC300 line with the addition of a 10TB model, Ultrastar DC HC330. While WD did have a 10TB DC HDD, the previous version as air filled while the Ultrastar DC HC330 is Helium filled meaning fewer disks and heads, while hitting the same capacity. WD goes on to state that the new HC330 comes with nearly a 40% performance boost on low queue random depth writes.
June 4th, 2019 by Michael Rink
Seagate Begins Shipping 16TB Hard Disk Drives
Today Seagate announced it has been actively shipping 16TB helium-based enterprise drive as part of the Exos X16 family. The company also announced that the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro Network Attached Storage drive lines will be getting 16TB capacity models.
January 15th, 2019 by Brian Beeler
Seagate IronWolf Health Management Brief
Seagate has been making NAS-specific hard drives for over five years, rebranding as IronWolf in 2016 to reinforce messaging around the drives being “tough, ready, and scalable.” It's not enough though to architect a drive for a specific application like NAS though, Seagate wants to differentiate themselves in the market by offering more. In this case that means IronWolf Health Management (IHM). NAS vendors can integrate with Seagate's IHM gain more visibility into drive health and usage indicators like temperature, shock, vibration, intermittent connections, and signal integrity. From here, the NAS vendor or the user themselves can take action to ensure their data is always safe and secure.
January 7th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Toshiba Announces 16TB MG08 Series HDDs
Today Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. announced what it is calling the largest Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) HDD, the MG08 Series. The new HDD series comes in a whopping 16TB, 33% more capacity than the more commonly used 12TB and 14% more capacity than the prior 14TB models. The new MG08 Series leverages CMR meaning that it can be dropped in as a higher capacity replacement for lower capacity drives in several systems.