- Seagate’s 30TB Exos M is helium-filled and constructed for knowledge facilities, not house 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 onerous disk drive has appeared on-line, providing what’s at present the biggest HDD obtainable for below $620.
ServerSupply lists the drive at $650, however making use of the location’s 5% low cost brings the value all the way down to $617.50.
Seagate’s Exos M (mannequin ST30000NM004K) is a helium-sealed 3.5-inch inside onerous drive constructed round typical magnetic recording (CMR) expertise.
Enterprise-grade capability at an unexpectedly low worth
With a 7200 RPM spindle velocity 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. In accordance with Seagate, it’s designed for high-capacity use instances together with hyperscale knowledge facilities, enterprise backup programs, 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 most of the similar core specs. Provantage lists the IronWolf Professional ST300000NT011 HDD for a barely greater $669.69, nonetheless an inexpensive worth for a drive of this capability.
Though they share similarities (30TB, CMR, 7200 RPM), their firmware, vibration tolerance, and workload optimizations will doubtless 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 most effective HDD relies upon fully on context.
For cloud infrastructure and archival storage, it could signify sturdy worth, notably at this worth.
However for on a regular basis customers, its 3.5-inch kind issue, 7200 RPM velocity, and enterprise-oriented characteristic set make it impractical.
Finally, the Seagate Exos M is a extremely specialised product, however its pricing makes it look accessible.
