The Seagate firm has launched the new IronWolf PRO, a series of HDD-type storage units that are available with up to 20 TB capacityA figure that may seem huge to a home user, but is almost “critical” for many professional settings.
The Seagate IronWolf PROs have been accompanied by the Exos X20, and yes, they both have that 20 TB capacity in common, and also the CMR technology (magnetic recording) and helium filling. As many of our readers will recall, the helium fill It allows to reduce the friction force that both the disks and the writing head must face, which has positive effects both on energy consumption and on the heat generated.
We keep going over its specifications, and we come across a 7,200 RPM rotational speed, a figure that has become a standard in those models that prioritize performance. Drives running at 5,400 RPM are much slower, making them undesirable in most cases.
Both models have 256 MB of cache, but they present important differences that we will see next. The IronWolf PRO has a maximum charge cycle of 300 TB of write per year, while the Exos model can reach the 550 TB. The latter also has a specific mode for NAS that lowers consumption to one watt, which makes it a very interesting solution to work with that type of equipment.
In terms of performance, Seagate has commented that they can reach up to 285 MB / s in sustained transfers. It’s a shame that these units don’t use Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, but they make up for it by offering pretty good specs, and they’re fairly reasonably priced too. We still do not know how much they will cost in Spain, but we do know that in the United States the 20 TB IronWolf PRO will cost 650 dollars, and the Exos X20 will have a price of 700 dollars.
If we transfer these prices to the Spanish market, applying VAT and rounding, the first should be in the range of 699 euros, while the second could be located between 749 and 799 euros. Looking at these figures, there is no doubt that hard drives still have a lot of life ahead of them, thanks to that excellent value they offer in relation to cost per gigabyte.
