Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 'world's fastest' 6TB hard drive launched

Seagate has launched a 6TB model in its Enterprise Capacity 3.5 line, which the company claims is the fastest 6TB hard drive in the world. The product is targeted at data centres and corporate environments that demand massive capacity and low cost of ownership, such as those belonging to cloud service providers.

Seagate's Enterprise Capacity 3.5 6TB spins at 7,200rpm and is available with either a 6Gbps SATA or a 12Gbps SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface. The company claims a 25 percent performance advantage over drives of the same capacity sold by its competitors. Both WD and Hitachi have launched 6TB hard drives which are filled with low-density Helium gas, which lets the drive's heads glide over its spinning platters with reduced friction. Seagate is claiming a significant performance advantage even though its drive does not use Helium.

The newly launched drive is designed for 24x7 operation, and is rated for up to 10 times the workload of a typical desktop hard drive. The mean time between failures (MTBF) is 1.4 million hours. Higher capacity drives translate to greater density in the same amount of rack space, or lower power and cooling expenses for large-scale deployments.

Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) and Instant Secure Erase (ISE) technology allow for secure storage and eventual disposal. Seagate also lists industry-leading rotational vibration tolerance as a feature, which improves performance consistency and error correction.

Seagate has not published pricing information yet. The drive, along with variants in lower capacities, is already shipping to resellers and server hardware vendors including QNAP, Synology and Supermicro.