Seagate to ship the world largest hard drive in December

Hard drives may have lost the battle of speed, but not size. SDDs are much faster, true, but soon we will have hard drives that are 20 times the size of a medium-size SSD hard drive.

SSDs have become the storage system of choice because they are minimal (especially the M.2 form factor models) and offer excellent read and write speeds. But they still have two essential handicaps: their size is limited, and they are expensive. Nevertheless, they are the assets that classic hard drives want to take advantage of. As a result, Seagate announced at Datasphere 2020 that it would release the world’s most massive hard drive in December.

This is the Seagate Exos 20+ model, which will have an incredible 20 TB capacity which is the world’s largest hard drive.

Although there are SSDs of several TB, their price is extraordinarily high. That is why the most versatile models are the 512 GB or 1 TB. The Exos 20+ hard drive will have 20-40 times the capacity.

SDDs are ideal for storing the operating system, games, and applications you use frequently. But with new generation titles that already occupy more than 150 GB, and with videos and photos at 4K or 8K resolution that also entertains dozens, hundreds of gigabytes, its space does not give much.

This is what Seagate wants to influence with its Exos 20+ hard drives: it offers between 20 and 40 times more storage space at a slower speed than SSDs. However, it is still acceptable for those who handle many games, applications, or multimedia data. Or they want to make backups.

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Seagate’s largest model currently on the market is the Seagate Exos X16(the world’s largest hard drive). With 16 TB of storage, a business hard drive costs 432 euros at Amazon. But today, he announced the Exos X18, with 18 TB of space.

The American company has not offered performance data or technical characteristics of the Seagate Exos 20+ hard drive with 20 TB that it will launch in December. Still, for example, the Exos above X16 and X18 reach 270 Mb / sg.

It is a limited performance compared to the 400 or 500 Mb / s on average that an SSD can achieve or the brutal 7,000 Mb / s of the new SSDs with PCI-e 4.0. But it is enough in the business environment to make backups. It can be helpful in a gaming environment if you do not prioritize the loading speed with the enormous extra of saving all your content on a single disk.

The new Seagate Exos 20+ will be the company’s first hard drive to employ HARM technology. This uses two arms with two reads / writes heads to read data and store it at a higher density. This achieves a performance close to the standard SSD: 480 MB / sec. These faster hard drives Seagate calls them MACH2.

We will see the first MACH2 drive with HARM technology in December, but the 20 TB is just the beginning. SDK has announced that you can store 5-6TB per square inch with HARM technology. This is 4 or 5 times more than current hard drives. It is intended to reach 80 TB in 2021.