What just happened? At the NAB 2023 conference in Las Vegas, Seagate unveiled its highest capacity conventional magnetic recording (CMR) hard drive, aimed at commercial and enterprise customers. Called the IronWolf Pro, the 22 TB hard disk drives come with Seagate's AgileArray technology and offer top-end NAS and DAS performance, as well as high RAID reliability in multi-bay and multi-user environments.
The IronWolf Pro 22TB drives have a conventional 3.5-inch form factor with SATA III (6.0Gb/s) interface. They comprise ten platters and 20 accompanying heads, and feature a 512MB cache and a spindle speed of 7200 RPM.
As explained by Seagate, the IronWolf Pro offers a rated workload of 550 TB/year, enabling users to store, share, and collaborate on large amounts of data over a network. It also has an SDR of up to 285 MB/s that should allow users to seamlessly share files, back up, and tackle heavy workloads in multi-user NAS environments. The HDDs also come with built-in rotational vibration (RV) sensors to provide RV mitigation.
The new 22TB hard drives come with Seagate's IronWolf Health Management system along with three years of complimentary Rescue Data Recovery Services. While the former helps protect data with prevention, intervention, and recovery recommendations to ensure peak system health, the latter makes for a hassle-free zero-cost data recovery experience.
The drives also have a rated MTBF (mean time between failures) of 2.5 million hours, which should offer peace of mind for users. Seagate is also offering a five-year limited warranty on its new HDDs. The IronWolf Pro 22 TB HDD has an MSRP of $599.99, but is currently available for purchase on Newegg for just $399.99, which comes to just over $18 per TB.
While this is Seagate's first 22TB offering, it is certainly not the first HDD in the market with that much capacity. Western Digital already has multiple 22TB models in its portfolio, including the Purple Pro, Gold, and Red Pro drives that were launched last year. They also carry a $600 MSRP like the Seagate offering, but are currently available on Newegg starting at $498.88.
WD also recently released a new external hard disk drive with an incredible 44TB of storage. It is aimed at consumers rather than enterprise customers, and packs two 22TB drives to help users "preserve their ever-growing digital world." They come with a USB-C port with support for up to 5Gbps transfers, and have 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1/USB 3.0 Type-A ports. They come in a RAID 0 configuration by default, but users can switch to RAID 1 for redundancy.