Seagate has revealed that it will be releasing a 16TB hard drive within the next eighteen months, bringing it closer to its goal of producing 20TB drives by 2020. During a Q2 2017 earnings call, Seagate CEO Stephen Luczo said the company plans to introduce a 16TB model soon and that testing of its forthcoming 12TB drive has been very positive.
“Our eight terabyte product leads the market in cost and performance and we are pleased with the ramp of our 10 terabyte product in terms of quality, performance, and customer qualifications,” Luczo said during the call (via Seeking Alpha). “For the last few quarters, our 12 terabyte product has been with customers for evaluation and the feedback has been positive.”
“During the next 12 to 18 months, we expect the nearline market to be diversified in capacity points for different application workloads, with use cases from two to four terabyte products for certain applications up to 16 terabyte for other use cases,” he added.
While the HDD market has shrunk slightly given the developments in solid state drive (SSD) technology, hard disks remain a cheaper option than their flash counterparts, especially for large data storage, RAID setups, and network-attached storage (NAS). The largest HDD Seagate has on the market now is its 10TB model, priced around $400.
