Seagate Technology Introduces World’s Largest Hard Disk

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in data storage and management solutions, introduced revolutionary open-source object storage software, a reference architecture powered by it, and a corresponding developer community.

Seagate’s inaugural Datasphere 2020 conference provided the perfect opportunity for the storage giant to unveil some exciting new products and technologies.

And the firm duly delivered, confirming what we all wanted to know: that the world’s biggest hard disk drive, the Exos 20+, will launch in December 2020.

The internal HDD will be the first to come with HAMR technology (which boosts capacity) and MACH2 actuator technology, designed to maintain performance SLA as capacity scales to the 50TB.

Dr. Dave Mosley, the CEO of Seagate, also dropped in two particularly interesting slides, the first of which shows a TCO saving of nearly a third when storing 1PB on 18TB, compared to 8TB.

The second showed the relative price per PB when using a 20TB HAMR, compared to a 50TB version, and demonstrated that the rapid and continuous adoption of the highest-capacity hard drives by hyperscalers delivers a "sustained cost advantage".

With that in mind, Seagate has also launched CORTX - an open-source S3-compatible object storage software-defined storage platform - as well as a reference architecture called Lyve Drive rack that can deliver up to 106 drives (or 2.12PB) per rack node.

The CORTX Community

CORTX Community is a group of open source researchers and developers working together to enable mass capacity object storage for the world’s proliferating data sets.

CORTX is now available for download and collaboration on GitHub. "Seagate delivers an open platform, with all the feature sets and roadmaps driven by the community—for the community," said Jeff McAffer, Senior Director of Product at GitHub. "It’s the kind of setting in which innovation happens."

While CORTX and CORTX Community are Seagate’s latest contributions to object storage, the company has long played a key role in its collaborative development. In the late 1990s, Seagate was a pioneering member of the industry consortium that created the very first object storage specification: the SNIA OSD standard. Seagate's commitment to innovation and collaboration in object storage continues in CORTX and its many architectural optimizations.

Both offerings drew praise from Intel and WekaIO.

Earlier this month, both Seagate and WD launched 18TB hard disk drives based on CMR and PMR technologies. It will be interesting to see whether cloud backup specialist BackBlaze uses these latest high capacity drives for its popular cloud storage service, giving us early feedback on performance and reliability.