Seagate Intros 4 TB NAS-Oriented HDDs

Seagate announced its new lineup of NAS oriented storage products. The new hard drives don't have a particularly remarkable name; Seagate has decided to just call it the Seagate NAS HDD. The units are meant to be used in home servers, NAS solutions, small business file sharing, and backup servers.

The drives will come in capacities up to 4 TB, spin at 5900 RPM, and carry a SATA3 interface. The biggest drive, the 4 TB version, will be able to sustain read rates of up to 180 MB/s. Packing five of these drives into a single five-bay NAS enclosure will give you a staggering 20 TB of storage.

Seagate's NAS HDDs will also be very silent. According to Seagate, the drives will be as quiet as 1.9 bels. Typically, the drives would be up to 2.5 bels loud, with 2.1 bels for the 2 TB model.

"Today about 50 percent of NAS arrays are sold diskless meaning that customers are challenged with identifying and installing the right storage for their system. By developing a drive like NAS HDD, we've taken the guesswork out of it and made it easy for customers to identify the right drive for their system," said Scott Horn, Seagate's VP of marketing. "By collaborating closely with a variety of partners who specialize in NAS systems, we're making what was a confusing effort into a plug-and-play one."

The NAS HDDs will have an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of one million hours and come with a three-year manufacturer warranty. So far there is no word on official pricing, though the drives have already shown up on NewEgg.com for $199.99, $169.99, and $139.99 for the 4 TB, 3 TB, and 2 TB models, respectively.