Seagate Exos X16 16TB HDD Review

1. Introduction2. Seagate X16 16TB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. IOMeter - 4K Random Test7. Throughput8. Workload Scenarios9. Real Life File Testing10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

It's was less than a year ago when Seagate launched a 14TB version of the Exos enterprise drive, but yet here we are with another new flagship drive to raise the bar even higher, the 16TB Exos X16.

Designed for use with hyperscale applications/cloud data centres, high-capacity density RAID storage, mainstream enterprise external storage arrays or even centralised surveillance, Seagate’s new Exos X16 16TB drive delivers 33% more petabytes per rack compared to 12TB drives while maintaining the same small footprint for a reduced overall total cost of ownership.

While it is all well and good having racks and racks of drives offering colossal amounts of storage, the real challenge is to keep the power consumption and therefore the operating costs for said drives as low as possible. The Exos X16 has a couple of Seagate's technologies to help with this; PowerChoice and PowerBalance.

PowerChoice is Seagate’s own implementation of the T10/T13 Approved Standard and uses four step by step modes to enhance power savings while the drive is in idle periods longer than a second. Seagate claims that savings up to 54% can be made on drive power consumption in enterprise environments with PowerChoice technology.

Typically PowerChoice is enabled via a SATA Set Feature command (or via the SAS Mode Page for a SAS drive). This allows flexibility so that optimal idle times can be set for a particular storage application. Once the technology has been enabled it puts the drive into deeper and deeper idle power states the longer the drive is idle.

Seagate’s PowerBalance feature helps optimise the IOPS/Watt for even greater efficiency in environments with the focus on random read/write operations. These power saving features, coupled with the overall solid performance from the 16TB drive, make the Exos X16 a very good option for the data centre market.

If you choose the Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) version of the drive then a very usual tool for business/enterprise users comes into play – Seagate Instant Secure Erase (ISE). This technology, used in conjunction with Seagate's SeaTools utility, is designed to protect data on hard disc drives by instantly resetting the drive back to factory settings and changing the encryption key so that any data remaining on the drive is cryptographically erased – meaning that all the data on the drive is instantly and permanently unreadable.

We found Seagate's Exos X16 on Span.com for £595.20 (inc VAT) HERE.

Pros

• Huge capacity.
• Performance.
• Power saving features.
• 5-year warranty.

Cons

• Pricey.

KitGuru says: Seagate's latest monster of a hard drive for the enterprise sector comes less than a year after the last one, the 14TB Exos X14, and adds yet more capacity to Seagate’s enterprise range of hard drives.

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