Bottom line: Solid state drives are still the ideal choice for performance-oriented applications but if it's sheer capacity you desire, traditional hard drives offer just that at a price that can't be rivaled.

Spinning hard drives are considered dated by most standards but advances are still being made to push the boundaries of capacity to new heights. Seagate's new 16TB drives are a perfect example of this.

The data storage company on Tuesday said it has been actively shipping its Exos X16 HDD, a 3.5-inch 7200 RPM drive designed specifically for enterprise applications.

More applicable to the average consumer, Seagate also announced its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro 16TB drives for home and small office NAS systems and small-medium business environments, respectively. The standard IronWolf drive packs a three-year warranty and is ideal for backups, remote access and file sharing while the Pro variant comes with a five-year warranty and is meant for environments with heavier workloads.

Both IronWolf models boast 256MB of cache and utilize the SATA 6Gb/s interface.

Seagate's Exos X16 16TB HDD carries an MSRP of $629 and is available to purchase from today. IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives are also in stock and shipping from Connection for $590.80 and $650.58, respectively.