Seagate Targets Monster 14TB And 16TB Hard Drives In 2018, Breaking The 20TB Barrier By 2020
While Seagate’s current HDDs top out at 10TB (12TB drives are currently sampling), CEO Stephen Luczo stated during his company’s most recent earnings call that 14TB and 16GB HDDs will roll off the production line within the next 18 months. And if that isn’t enough storage to handle all of your movies, TV shows, games, and archival data, Seagate is on track to deliver a 20TB hard drive by the year 2020.
Right now, Seagate’s 10TB HDDs are priced at around $410 (if you’re after a Skyhawk surveillance drive) and creep up to around the $470 mark for a 7200 RPM Barracuda Pro with 256MB of cache. We’d expect similar pricing for the 14TB and 16TB HDDs once they arrive next year.
For comparison, Samsung’s 15.3TB PM1633a SSD was priced at a budget-busting $10,000 when it launched in early 2016. However, CDW says that the SSD has been discontinued as of November 30th, 2016.
Even though Seagate is still devoting resources to improving the storage density of its HDDs, the company is also simultaneously showing off its SSD prowess. In August 2016, the company showcased an enterprise-class SSD with an eye-popping capacity of 60TB. Using a dual-port 12GBps SAS interface, the SSD is capable of 128KB read/write speeds of 1,500 MB/s and 1,000 MB/s respectively. While those performance figures pale in comparison to some of today’s highest performing SSDs, it stands head and shoulders above what’s possible with today’s current HDDs.
