Seagate has published an official document on its web site which details the company’s first 8 TB hard drive. Thus by releasing the new company product Seagate will close the gap with long time rival Western Digital which has 10 TB hard drives as we speak.
Unfortunately do not expect ground-breaking performance from Seagate’s new hard drive. It belongs to a new line called Archive and is designed for data storage rather than heavy use. Then again it can perfectly work 24/7 given its nature, something that cannot be said for most desktop hard drives out there. The new Seagate Archive 8 TB features 128 MB of cache, support for SATA 3.0 and 5900 rpm rotational speed for the platters. Speaking of them, the drive packs six platters at 1.33 TB each and sports shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which increases data recording density. The drive can transfer data at 190 MB/sec maximum and is designed for up to 180 TB of data recording per year. Its middle-time-before-failure (MTBF) indicator is 800 000 hours, which isn’t bad.
The new drive is on the market in Europe now where it sells for EUR 250 and should reach the rest of the world soon.
Source: Seagate