Seagate announced today that they have managed to achieve new feats of storage capacity. Seagate is the first company to get an 8TB 3.5” HDD to the consumer market, according to Seagate Vice President of Marketing Scott Horn. This comes only a few months after the company released its 6TB HDD and hopefully means they may be creating even larger HDDs as they are learning more about achieving high density storage in the restrictive space, but that’s probably overly optimistic speculation on my side.
This probably will not directly benefit most users and is currently being targeted to enterprise-level database and cloud-focused clients. We can hope that the advent of 8TB drives will drive down costs of existing 4TB solutions, though. 8TB is a hell of a lot of space to use, but being able to fit it into the (current) normal 3.5” drive means an instant boost to storage without having to invest more money in newer racks or custom drive bays. These drives also use less power (Watts/GB) than current existing options, which not only makes the storage able to fit the same amount of physical space, but also more affordable for the life of the drives.
John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president for hard disk drives, had this to say regarding the new drive:
“Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content. Seagate’s new 8TB HDD provides IT managers with a new option for improving storage density in the data center, thus helping them to tackle one of the largest and fastest growing data categories within enterprise storage economically.”
Currently, this drive is only being offered to select customers, but Seagate is expecting next quarter to make it widely available. At this time we don’t have any specs or prices, but we’ll keep you posted as we hear more.
- Scott "Abibiliboop" Griffin.