Seagate ST16000NM001G 16TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5in Exos X16 Hard Drive

The Seagate ST16000NM001G is the 16TB SATA model in the Exos X16 family, a helium-sealed 3.5-inch nearline drive that spins at 7200 RPM and carries a 256MB cache. It is the standard, non-encrypting version of the 16TB SATA drive. Seagate rates it for a sustained transfer rate of up to 261 MB/s at the outer tracks and for 24x7 operation, with an MTBF of 2.5 million hours.

This is a capacity drive, not a performance drive. It suits bulk and nearline storage: backup targets, object and file storage, scale-out clusters such as Ceph or Hadoop, surveillance archives and large RAID sets. Seagate's product manual caps the rated workload at 550TB per year. For latency-sensitive databases or boot volumes, 10K or 15K SAS drives or SSDs are the better fit.

The interface is SATA 6Gb/s with a single port. A SATA drive works on SATA ports and on most SAS controllers and backplanes, but it does not give you the dual-port path redundancy of a SAS drive. If your array needs dual-path SAS, Seagate's 16TB SAS model is ST16000NM002G, a different part. The drive ships formatted as 512e and can be switched to 4Kn with Seagate's FastFormat routine, which erases everything on the drive, so decide before you load data.

The ST16000NM001G is sold as a bare drive with no tray. Before ordering, check these points:

• Your chassis or NAS takes standard 3.5-inch, 26.1mm drives and you have the right tray or caddy for each bay.
• Branded servers from HPE or Dell use their own carriers and may flag drives that do not carry their firmware.
• You do not need self-encryption. The SED version of this drive is ST16000NM003G.
• Your controller and operating system handle 512e drives larger than 2TB (UEFI and GPT for boot use).