Fast Seagate 6 TB Drive Offered for Enterprise Data Centers

Could it really be the fastest 6 TB hard disk drive in the world? Seagate says its Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch HDD v4 is not only the fastest but also an important step forward in scale-out data infrastructures serving up "supersize" storage and reliability to keep up with massive growth of both corporate and cloud-based data centers.

That's a mouthful, but considering the explosion of big data it's probably a welcome sound in the ears of enterprise IT executives.

In the new product announcement, Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing, used a statistic from market research firm IDC that is becoming familiar in big-data circles: Unstructured-data growth is doubling exponentially and is expected to reach 16 zettabytes of data by as early as 2017.

"This will cause cloud service providers to look for innovative ways to store more within an existing footprint while lowering operational costs," Horn said. "Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the fastest 6 TB enterprise capacity HDD based on our proven, reliable platform meeting this never-ending demand in both private and public cloud data centers."

Should Be Well Received

According to Seagate, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4 offers the fastest performance available for a nearline hard disk drive (HDD). That, the company said, results in faster data transfers because it's building on an eighth-generation platform that lets the drive deliver up to a 25 percent increase in performance over other 6 TB drives on the market.

Those specs work perfectly for 24x7 bulk data storage. And by leveraging the latest generation 12 Gb/s serial attached SCSI (SAS), Seagate said, the drive offers scalability for future-proofing systems. The company is also making the drive available in an enterprise-ready SATA 6 Gb/s interface, which it said paves the way for easier system integration.

Dave Reinsel, IDC's group vice president for...