Conclusion
With all of the headline-grabbing advances on the solid state storage front, the equally impressive achievements happening in the typical spindle-based market pass largely unnoticed. Well it’s time to sit up and take notice because Seagate has shown the enterprise market a clear path forward with their new Enterprise Capacity v4 6TB hard drive.
While many times we see marketing bullet points add up to nothing more than vague promises none of this drive’s technological feats is mere window dressing. If anything, they have been combined to make what is arguably the best HDD currently available, one that sets the bar for an entire market segment.
By and large the enterprise storage market values dependable and scalability above all else and the Enterprise Capacity v4 offers exactly that but adds in healthy doses of incredible performance and energy efficiency for good measure. The performance aspect of that equation comes from its dual core controller, highly optimized firmware and massive 128MB cache structure which team up to offer benchmark-setting sustained throughput. This allows it to easily outperform Seagate’s previous generation of enterprise HDDs while also achieving near-parity with the enthusiast-grade Western Digital Velociraptor.
NAND may be the next logical step for mass storage applications in terms of overall efficiency, there are several aspects that have prevented its widespread adoption. The first and foremost among these is cost. While a single Enterprise Capacity 6TB HDD my cost $550, achieving that capacity with something like Intel’s DC S3500 series would put a corporation back a staggering $7500. Add to that an MTBF of 1.4 million hours along with some of the best error correction routines available and Seagate make a very good case for their newest drives in cost-optimized, mission-critical environments.
What has been achieved by Seagate touches upon overall efficiency as well. While there hasn’t been any movement from one generation to the next from a power consumption standpoint, their new drive consumes the same amount of power despite a 50% capacity boost and much better performance. This will effectively allow the deployment of drastically higher capacity arrays without adding to TDP or power requirements. It’s a win / win situation of epic proportions.
From every perspective, Seagate has created something special with the Enterprise Capacity v4. It has obviously been designed from the ground-up to be leveraged into database environments that can benefit from its higher capacity, enhanced performance and incredible longevity. It even provides an enticing possibility for home buyers but can stomach its relatively high price and want something that will house their own critical data for decades to come.
<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/EC_v4_6TB/dam_good.jpg" border="0" alt="" /> <img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/EC_v4_6TB/di.png" border="0" alt="" /></div>
Conclusion
With all of the headline-grabbing advances on the solid state storage front, the equally impressive achievements happening in the typical spindle-based market pass largely unnoticed. Well it’s time to sit up and take notice because Seagate has shown the enterprise market a clear path forward with their new Enterprise Capacity v4 6TB hard drive.
While many times we see marketing bullet points add up to nothing more than vague promises none of this drive’s technological feats is mere window dressing. If anything, they have been combined to make what is arguably the best HDD currently available, one that sets the bar for an entire market segment.
By and large the enterprise storage market values dependable and scalability above all else and the Enterprise Capacity v4 offers exactly that but adds in healthy doses of incredible performance and energy efficiency for good measure. The performance aspect of that equation comes from its dual core controller, highly optimized firmware and massive 128MB cache structure which team up to offer benchmark-setting sustained throughput. This allows it to easily outperform Seagate’s previous generation of enterprise HDDs while also achieving near-parity with the enthusiast-grade Western Digital Velociraptor.
NAND may be the next logical step for mass storage applications in terms of overall efficiency, there are several aspects that have prevented its widespread adoption. The first and foremost among these is cost. While a single Enterprise Capacity 6TB HDD my cost $550, achieving that capacity with something like Intel’s DC S3500 series would put a corporation back a staggering $7500. Add to that an MTBF of 1.4 million hours along with some of the best error correction routines available and Seagate make a very good case for their newest drives in cost-optimized, mission-critical environments.
What has been achieved by Seagate touches upon overall efficiency as well. While there hasn’t been any movement from one generation to the next from a power consumption standpoint, their new drive consumes the same amount of power despite a 50% capacity boost and much better performance. This will effectively allow the deployment of drastically higher capacity arrays without adding to TDP or power requirements. It’s a win / win situation of epic proportions.
From every perspective, Seagate has created something special with the Enterprise Capacity v4. It has obviously been designed from the ground-up to be leveraged into database environments that can benefit from its higher capacity, enhanced performance and incredible longevity. It even provides an enticing possibility for home buyers but can stomach its relatively high price and want something that will house their own critical data for decades to come.
<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/EC_v4_6TB/dam_good.jpg" border="0" alt="" /> <img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/EC_v4_6TB/di.png" border="0" alt="" /></div>
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