With the amount of data created, captured or replicated across the globe rising to 175 zettabytes by 2025, Seagate announces its 16TB hard drives, robust solutions for creative professionals.

SSDs are great, in the different shapes and forms they take today, but nothing beats HDDs, in terms of cost per megabyte. That explains why companies continue to develop HDD solutions, expanding not only features but also capacity. Seagate announced this month that the company has been actively shipping 16TB helium-based enterprise drives as part of the Exos X16 family, delivering high performance and record capacity for hyperscale data centers to efficiently and cost-effectively manage ever-increasing amounts of data.

The Seagate Exos X16 enterprise drive is designed for maximum storage capacity and the highest rack-space efficiency. Protected with Seagate Secure and delivering up to 16TB capacity, the Exos X16 delivers the greatest efficiencies and highest storage densities of the datasphere. You may think that the Exos X drive is exclusively for data centers and big enterprises  but nomadic filmmaker Sam Kolder will probably change your opinion.

Exos X for filmmakers too

The Canadian moviemaker with 1 million Instagram followers adopted the Exos X so he could have all files in one Exos-powered system. Kolder and the team started using the 10TB version available as a data storage solution that would keep their footage safe during travels, allow them to access and process from anywhere in the world, and keep up with their fast-paced workflow and ever-increasing data storage needs.

Now Kolder and other professionals have the option to use a drive that almost doubles the capacity, with the new Exos X16 HDD, the world’s highest capacity 3.5-inch 7200 RPM drive designed to solve challenges by enabling hyperscale, datacenter, OEM and distribution channel businesses to maximize storage capacities, provide customer flexibility, and reduce complexity with uses in multiple workloads with increased I/O and enhanced caching capabilities.

175 zettabytes (ZB) of data by 2025

According to Seagate, the new Exos X16 16TB drive delivers 33 percent more petabytes per rack compared to 12TB drives while maintaining the same small footprint for a reduced overall total cost of ownership. Exos X16 offers built-in data protection, including Seagate Secure Instant Secure Erase for safe, affordable, fast, and easy drive retirement.

“The Exos X16 is key in reducing total cost of ownership for enterprise system developers and cloud data centers while supporting multiple applications with varying workloads,” said Sai Varanasi, vice president of product line marketing at Seagate Technology. “The Exos X16 is the industry’s leading helium-based 16TB capacity drive. We are partnering with our cloud/enterprise customers to bring this product to the market to fulfill the pent-up exabyte demand in data centers.”

The need for hyperscale, cloud, and NAS storage solutions continues to rise to unprecedented levels. According to a recent IDC whitepaper sponsored by Seagate, the Global Datasphere – the amount of data created, captured or replicated across the globe – will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025. Seagate’s Exos X16 hard drive delivers the highest storage density available with the field-proven reliability and continuous high performance to support a broad range of workload requirements and high-availability use cases.

Protecting footage with IronWolf

The new 16TB helium-based enterprise drives of the Exos X16 family are not the only new HDD solutions introduced this month. Seagate also updated the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive lines with new 16TB capacity models, built for multi-user NAS environments and supporting workloads up to 300TB/year. IronWolf is, according to Seagate, the ideal drive for home and small office NAS systems that deliver performance, low noise and low power consumption, making it efficient for everyday use such as back up, remote access and file sharing. IronWolf Pro drives are robust for NAS that operate in creative pro and small-medium business environments that demand heavy workloads to support their data needs.

The company points to one example: commercial wedding photographer and videographer Justin Wojtczak, who deals with a great deal of irreplaceable data. Since photos and videos of weddings cannot be reshot, protecting footage is of utmost importance to Wojtczak and his company 375 Photography. For the important job of protecting data, he turns to the Seagate IronWolf NAS drive.

The Exos X16 16TB HDD costs $629 and is available now. The Iron Wolf 16TB and IronWolf Pro 16TB will cost $609 and $664, respectively, when available.

For more information on the new Seagate Exos X16, IronWolf 16TB, IronWolf Pro 16TB and other Seagate products, visit the company’s website.