Seagate 8TB “Archive HDD” Now $260 - Stability Concerns & SMR Recovery

With the hard drive storage market slimmed-down to just a few major players – Hitachi now owned by WD – the market has felt relatively stagnant for the past year. Seagate recently announced that its SMR 8TB HDD, branded as an “archive HDD,” will soon be available for $260.

The new 8TB HDD spins at 5900RPM, hosts 128MB of cache, and – according to Seagate – averages 150MB/s read/write throughput. These specs ensure a slower drive overall that remains focused on archival storage. Hard drives of the Archive HDD's nature should generally not be used as the primary disk in a system, given the slower speeds and generally longer seek or wake times (if you must use an HDD, we'd suggest 7200RPM as a baseline).

Using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), Seagate is able to increase the data density on its platters by overlapping the recording tracks atop one another. This data-driven approach has been used in Enterprise and Cloud applications that implement the devices in nested raid (allowing data recovery), but isn't common in consumer use-case scenarios. If a drive drops communications with the host or co-RAID devices and is SMR, there is inherently a lower chance of data recovery by the end-user due to the overlapped recording technique. This trade-off may be worth the increased data capacity for some, though.

The company doesn't necessarily have the best reputation for reliability, but a 3-year warranty intends to hedge some of the negativity. Still, at 8TB, we'd feel a bit uneasy trusting a single HDD with all of that data. Make backups, folks.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.