Seagate’s clever new storage system can heal itself

Seagate has just launched a new line of storage systems that come with a self-healing feature that minimises human intervention.

Seagate says that this ADR (Autonomous Drive Regeneration) tech can renew a drive “in-situ”, thereby eliminating the need to manually have to swap the drive when it stops working or malfunctions for any reason. (Seagate)

Seagate has launched a new line of storage systems for enterprises that feature a unique self-healing system. This helps these storage solutions more reliable and reduces the need for human intervention. Called Autonomous Drive Regeneration (ADR), this self-healing system is a part of Seagate's new Exos Corvault high-density storage system that has been designed to offer SAN-level performance in places like data centers where you need the system to work longer and without hassles. 

Seagate says that this ADR tech can renew a drive “in-situ”, thereby eliminating the need to manually have to swap the drive when it stops working or malfunctions for any reason. According to the company, ADR helps most drives return to a “dependable service” state by reconfiguring it to bypass errant components. Additionally, this also helps increase the drive's longevity. And that's not all, there is a positive environmental impact here as well. Seagate says that ADR will reduce the environmental impact of computer e-waste by keeping the drives working for longer and therefore keeping them away from the landfill for as long as possible. Basically, less e-waste and that's perhaps the best thing alongside the fact that you conserve man-power as well. 

The Seagate Corvault drive comes housed in a maximum-density 4U chassis that can accommodate 106 drives in just seven inches (18 cms) of rack space. The Seagate Corvault system has been further tuned to protect the drive against vibrational and acoustic interference. It has also been fortified to deal with heat and power irregularities as well. 

The Corvault uses a “fully redundant, hot swappable dual storage controllers that are powered by the new VelosCT application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip to deliver sequential read/write up to 14Gb/s and 12Gb/s, and input/output operations per second (IOPS) of up to 17,680”. All the drives included in the Seagate Corvault system are equipped with the company's self-encrypting drive (SED) tech and also support SFTP for secure file transfers.

Seagate is yet to announce the pricing details for the Corvault but it is going on sale in July this year so we should know details regarding this soon.