- Seagate’s 30TB Exos M is helium-filled and constructed for knowledge facilities, not dwelling PCs
- 2.5 million hours MTBF sounds nice till you understand how particular this use case is
- The IronWolf Professional HDD targets NAS customers, not hyperscale cloud infrastructure like Exos M
A brand new itemizing for Seagate’s 30TB Exos M laborious disk drive has appeared on-line, providing what’s presently the most important HDD obtainable for underneath $620.
ServerSupply lists the drive at $650, however making use of the positioning’s 5% low cost brings the value right down to $617.50.
Seagate’s Exos M (mannequin ST30000NM004K) is a helium-sealed 3.5-inch inside laborious drive constructed round typical magnetic recording (CMR) know-how.
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Enterprise-grade capability at an unexpectedly low value
With a 7200 RPM spindle pace and a 512MB multi-segmented cache, it delivers a sustained knowledge switch fee of as much as 275MB/s.
The drive helps a SATA interface and is hot-plug succesful. Based on Seagate, it’s designed for high-capacity use circumstances together with hyperscale knowledge facilities, enterprise backup techniques, and distributed file storage frameworks like Hadoop and Ceph.
The producer additionally reviews a imply time between failures (MTBF) of two.5 million hours and an annualized failure fee of simply 0.35%, suggesting this mannequin is supposed for continuous, 24/7 operation.
Extra options embody PowerBalance and PowerChoice applied sciences for extra environment friendly power administration, and RSA 3072 firmware verification for safety.
These specs strongly point out that the Exos M is tailor-made towards enterprise infrastructure, not the standard desktop setup.
One other Seagate 30TB drive additionally seems in listings and shares lots of the identical core specs. Provantage lists the IronWolf Professional ST300000NT011 HDD for a barely greater $669.69, nonetheless an reasonably priced value for a drive of this capability.
Though they share similarities (30TB, CMR, 7200 RPM), their firmware, vibration tolerance, and workload optimizations will probably differ as a result of Exos is tuned for hyperscale environments, whereas IronWolf Professional is optimized for NAS workloads.
Regardless of the attention-grabbing capability, calling Seagate Exos M the very best HDD relies upon solely on context.
For cloud infrastructure and archival storage, it might characterize sturdy worth, significantly at this value.
However for on a regular basis customers, its 3.5-inch type issue, 7200 RPM pace, and enterprise-oriented function set make it impractical.
Finally, the Seagate Exos M is a extremely specialised product, however its pricing makes it look accessible.