Seagate Launches World’s First 8TB Hard Drive
Seagate takes the lead on storage density, but is keeping mum on the technology used
Seagate has started shipping what it claims to be the world’s first mechanical hard drive to offer 8TB of storage.
The latest entry in its Enterprise Capacity product line comes in a standard 3.5-inch form factor, and can instantly double the storage density of existing servers.
The previous record for HDD capacity was set by Western Digital, which used Helium to boost the available space to 6TB in November 2013. Seagate announced its first 6TB drive in April 2014.
The larger capacity drives were primarily designed for bulk storage of cloud content, object storage and back-up and disaster recovery.
Size matters
By considerably increasing the capacity of a drive, Seagate says it has created a device with a lower price-per-GB and, as a result, lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than the standard 4TB drives. At the same time, the new entry offers the lowest Watt-per-GB ratio in the industry, reducing operating costs.
“Public and private data centres are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president for hard drives.
“Seagate’s new 8TB HDD provides IT managers with a new option for improving storage density in the data centre, thus helping them to tackle one of the largest and fastest growing data categories within enterprise storage economically.”
The new drives are connected through SATA 6Gb/s, but the materials available to the press do not mention what technology Seagate used to improve storage density.
Some experts suspect Shingle Magnetic Recording (SMR) – a technique that allows squeezing more tracks onto a disk surface by partially overlapping them. SMR depends on the traditional HDD hardware components, but requires specialised software to work.
Seagate has already started shipping the new drives to select customers, expecting wide scale availability next quarter. The company previously promised to deliver 10TB hard drives before the end of the financial year.
By 2015-2016, Seagate hopes to launch hard drives that feature Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). With HAMR, the recording head includes a tiny laser that heats up the medium before information is written, to allow the use of smaller magnetic grains and narrower data tracks. The technology was successfully demonstrated in 2012 and could take information density to unbelievable 5TB/in2, but there are still plenty of kinks left to iron out.
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