Seagate Ships 30 TB Hard Drives for $600
In a press release that scores high on the buzzword count, Seagate writes:
Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a global leader in mass-capacity data storage, today announced the global channel availability of up to 30TB Exos ®M and IronWolf® Pro hard drives. Built on Seagate’s Mozaic3+™ platform and powered by heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, these drives are engineered to meet increasing demand for scalable, high-performance storage driven by the rise of AI deployments that are supplementing traditional enterprise infrastructure development.
My first hard drive in 1989 was a Seagate 30 MB drive (see “The Mac Turns 25: Our First Macs,” 25 January 2009), so it’s somewhat sobering to realize that these new Seagate 30 TB drives can store (cue the Dr. Evil accent) one million times more data for $600. In fact, the 1989 drive (available for about $250) would cost roughly the same $600 in today’s dollars, meaning that the price per megabyte has also dropped by a factor of one million, from $20 to $0.00002.
Claims about AI aside, $600 isn’t much if you need 30 TB of storage for any purpose. The hard part will be backing up that much data.
Nice. For those who care, here are the datasheets. Exos-M and IronWolf Pro.
These are helium-filled 7200 RPM drives. CMR and 512MB cache. They’re also remarkably low power. 7W when idle and 9.5W maximum.
I am surprised to see that the interface is SATA and not SAS. But maybe that’s available as a different SKU for the same drive (it should be the same mechanism, but with a different circuit board.
That was what my college was selling my freshman year, in 1987. It was a 30M Seagate ST238R and sold for $300 from the college’s computer store.
The first HDD I bought for myself was a year or two later - an 80M SCSI ST296N. I think I paid about $300-400 for it, including an el-cheapo ST01 SCSI controller. Surprisingly, when I just did a web search for it, it appears to be a really popular drive for modern retrocomputing, and appears in a lot of eBay listings. I still have mine, mounted in an external enclosure. I plan on using it someday with my Apple IIGS, if I can ever find an affordable SCSI card.
If you need that much storage, then you will probably be mounting several of them in a RAID array. Either mirroring it to another array or backing it up to the new (and very expensive) LTO-10 tape drive. Or if you’re using a large RAID, a tape autoloader equipped with one or two LTO-10 drives.
But if you’re not a corporate IT department, you probably can’t justify the expense of such a tape solution.
I already found a review:
One interesting thing the review mentioned is that both of these drives both “feature hardware-level secure data management, supporting Seagate’s Instant Secure Erase (ISE) to allow administrators to cryptographically erase all user data before redeploying or decommissioning a drive.”
Very similar to what Apple does with their SSDs. Which is great, because you really don’t want to spend several days wiping a 30TB drive at the end of its life, and with this feature, you don’t need the server to waste CPU cycles on the encryption.
Ah, 1989. I bought my first personal computer during my senior year of college: an SE/30 with a 40 MB hard drive. (It was a stretch to afford the 40 MB model with 4 MB of RAM and an ImageWriter II. The 80 MB model was out of my reach.) For a few minutes, I probably was the student with the most computing capability on campus!
By 1996, I was working at a big pharmaceutical company and bought a twelve-drive 40 GB RAID unit for somewhere around $50k. A few years later, I bought a 1.2 TB RAID unit for who knows how much money. I want to say that it was six shelves of drives. Lots of blinkenlights!
At 30 TB for $600, maybe it’s time to upgrade my two drive home NAS!
My first hard drive was the Applied Engineering HDD in a PSU for my Apple //e, which was both super cool, and one of the slickest pieces of hardware I had for that computer. I think it was 10 Mb.
I agree $600 isn’t too bad for 30 TB.
Kevin
Yes! That’s exactly what I had—I couldn’t remember the model number, but as soon as you wrote it, everything flooded back. Mine was a bare drive, and I installed it in a cheap case I found somewhere that had room (and power and cooling) for five full-height drives. It wasn’t exactly quiet.
And I had to add a SCSI card and build a cable.
I was thinking that too, but then figured that RAID wasn’t really a backup and decided not to wade into the weeds.
(Hijacking this thread into a “my first hard drive…” thread!)
My first hard drive would have been around winter 1990, a 20MB external footprint-sized drive for my awesome Mac Plus, which previously had to rely on its internal floppy drive and an external floppy drive. I don’t recall the manufacturer or the cost, but I do (I think) recall the sound of it spinning up and then (once spun up) I could start the Mac and its startup sound.
People today have no idea what a breakthrough in performance it was to go from a single floppy configuration to a dual floppy config or from a dual floppy config to a hard drive config! Basking in nostalgia!
Going by memory, around 1983 when working at one of the Apple dealerships in Edmonton, I remember it was a big deal when the Apple Profile /// dropped from a suggested Canadian retail price of 3,595 to 2,995.
This was for a whopping 5 megabyte ST-506 in an Apple package with some extra hardware to handle the interface. We did sell a few Apple ///'s with the Profile as an accounting package with Great Plains software.
I probably still have some old Apple Canada price lists around. I will have to see what other examples I can dig up.
I worked on a Hewlett-Packard desktop in 1985. I think it was the 125. It ran CP/M, not DOS. The 5 MB hard drive was as large as the main desktop and cost $5,000. That means it was 250 million times as expensive as Seagate’s 30 TB drive.
Found a picture:
And we all remember a period when you could run some software to double the size of your huge 20 MB drive. Feeling old…
The first hard drive I remember being sold retail (I did not own it), was the TRS-80 “Five Meg Disk System”:
This monstrosity (with a footprint as large as the whole computer) was designed for use with the TRS-80 model III and cost $2500 (including the controller card and installation).
h/t: TRS-80 Computers: TRS-80 Model III – Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revived Site
At the risk of encouraging yet another nostalgia thread, my first hard drive for my Mac 512 K was an external box whose brand I don’t remember, but it was 10 megs. Before mounting it, you had to load its driver with a floppy. Every time. It cost $800. Around 1985 or 1986.
Disk Doubler!
Hey, I had one of those. But I believe it had dual 5.25 inch floppy drives rather than a hard disk (in an enclosure that looked similar to your picture).
I think it was 1987 when I bought a Mac SE. The college had two rooms full of Mac computers, and many students had their entire lives on 3.5 inch floppies, either for use in the labs or for shuttling between the labs and home. I bought a 40 MB external drive and shuttled it between home and school. The SE had a 20 MB internal drive that was fast compared to floppy speeds, but that 40 MB external ran circles around it.
Back in 1985, both Sharon and I bought 20MB drives, the Mac Hard Disk 20 for, I think, close to $1500. EVERYTHING was expensive but we considered it necessary. The value we get for our bucks these days is astounding!
///Rich
400K oughta be enough for anyone
When I was shopping for my first computer (1981), a salesman answered my query about what kilobytes meant in the real world by saying, “Sixty-four kilobytes is more than you will ever need.”
And that reminds me of the joke about the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman. “The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.” (FWIW, the 64K in that first computer never caused me a problem.)
A bit earlier, and probably more foolish. I purchased a 5 MB “HyperDrive” for my 128 K Mac. I don’t remember who installed it, but I DO remember it as my first introduction to “Torx” drivers, which held the case to the innards. Already a practicing physician, I had NO idea that the back end of the CRT needed to be respected except if another doc and a defibrillator were also present. Back then, even with TWO of those “humongous” 3.5" rigid floppies, just launching a program was enough to fill a coffee break. I made another voyage into my second Mac (a Mac Plus in which I had to snip a motherboard resistor to enable a boost from 1.5 to 4 MBytes of RAM). But, the DRAMATIC increase in performance enabled by that 5 MB internal was astounding, back when “Mac Porn” was an ASCII image of Cheryl Tiegs in a swimsuit, emerging over the course of a few minutes from an original ImageWriter.
I guess you didn’t know (probably a good thing) about this mouse-enabled, er, utility:
;-)