IT Pro: SansDigital EliteSTOR ES424X12 JBOD

We amassed 24 of Seagate's 6 TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDDs, a total of 144 TB of storage, to test the 12 Gb/s EliteSTOR enclosure in a variety of RAID configurations.

The first HDD back in 1956 weighed a few tons, consisted of fifty 24-inch disks and featured a whopping 5MB capacity. It's amazing that even with a 4K monitor we still aren't viewing a single 4128x3096 cell phone picture at full resolution, and the first HDD stored less than one picture taken on a modern smartphone (depending upon the quality of your camera).

Clever storage engineers were on the case, and after 51 years (yes, 51 years) the first 1TB HDD made its way to market. This may seem like a snail's pace, but it only took two years to go from 1TB to 2TB. We recently wrote a piece on an 8TB HDD, and 10TB HDDs are already making their way into the datacenter.

Read the review on Tom's IT Pro.

The size of a single picture is incredibly large today, but it is nothing in comparison to video. Roughly 1 hour of uncompressed 4K video requires up to 2TB of storage, and for a video production house 1 hour is merely a drop in the bucket. The video can be compressed of course, but tremendous capacity is required when hundreds of hours of video need to be sifted through and edited.

Video production also requires speed, and a single HDD isn't going to cut it. Of course the uninitiated are going to consider SSDs for about two seconds, or until they price 12+ TB of SSD storage.

Read the review on Tom's IT Pro.

HDDs are the go-to solution for large datasets, and the 12Gb/s SAS SanDigital EliteSTOR ES424X12 JBOD is designed to provide enough speed to power through demanding workloads, from video editing to enterprise storage applications, that require a mix of beefy capacity and throughput. The enclosure also offers daisy-chaining functionality, which enables the infrastructure to scale out to 256 HDDs through additional enclosures.

We amassed 24 of Seagate's 6TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDDs, a total of 144TB of storage, to test the 12Gb/s EliteSTOR enclosure in a variety of RAID configurations. Come along as we test the EliteSTOR JBOD with 144TB of raw storage at Tom's IT Pro.