Seagate has announced that it is now shipping the world’s first 8TB hard disk drive, providing scale-out data infrastructures with supersized-capacity, energy-efficiency, and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry for cloud content, object storage, and back-up disaster recovery storage.
Seagate has announced that it is now shipping the world’s first 8TB hard disk drive, providing scale-out data infrastructures with supersized-capacity, energy-efficiency, and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry for cloud content, object storage, and back-up disaster recovery storage.
The new 8TB hard drive provides bulk data storage solutions for online content storage, which provide customers with the highest capacity density to address the constant growth of unstructured data in an industry-standard 3.5-inch HDD. The drive also delivers maximum rack density, within an existing footprint, helping to create the most efficient data center floor-space usage possible.
In addition, the 8TB hard disk drive increases system capacity using fewer components, which, as a result, can increase system and staffing efficiencies all the while lowering power costs. Because of its low operating power consumption, Seagate’s new drive reliably conserves energy and thus reducing overall operating costs. It also offers the best Watts per GB for enterprise bulk data storage on today’s market.
Seagate’s 8TB drive provides enterprise-class reliability and support for archive workloads as well as multi-drive RV tolerance for consistent enterprise-class performance in high density environments. Additionally, the drive incorporates a SATA 6Gb/s interface for cost-effective, easy system integration into both private and public data centers.
As to other details, Seagate isn't providing any. An educated guess however would suggest this could be the next iteration of Seagate's SMR technology on the 5K Terascale platform. As Seagate suggests the drive is meant for archiving, their SMR technology and low-power slow spindle speed makes sense. While the drives may be technically shipping, they're more likely in what's called "directed availability," going to more forgiving customers with specific use cases where these drives make sense rather than into the market at large.
Availability
Seagate is now shipping the 8TB drives; wide-scale availability is set for Q4 2014.
Update: Our Review of the Seagate Archive 8TB HDD
