Seagate has announced what they're claiming is the "world's fastest 6TB HDD", known imaginatively as the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD. The fast speeds can be mostly put down to an operating speed of 7,200 RPM, which makes the hard drive 25% faster than competing solutions.

The Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD boasts either 12 Gb/s SAS connectivity, or standard SATA 6 Gb/s, depending on the model you opt for, delivering a sustained transfer rate of up to 226 MB/s. Seagate also claims the drive offers the "highest density storage per square foot in the industry", as it fits into a standard 3.5" bay.

As the drive is designed for enterprise scenarios such as cloud data centers, it's built for reliability. The drive's data sheet lists a mean time between failure of 1.4 million hours (around 160 years), and has been engineered for constant workloads, or 550 TB of transfers per year.

Alongside the high-end 6 TB model, Seagate will also be offering 5 TB, 4 TB and 2 TB drives with either SATA or SAS connectivity. All drives come with a five year limited warranty, and can be set to self-encrypt and instantly erase if they're used in secure environments.

The drive is shipping now through resellers and will be integrated into storage products this spring. As usual, there's no word on how much the drive will cost, but as it's an enterprise-class performance model we don't expect it'll be cheap.