Seagate announces 8TB NAS-centric hard drive
January 13, 2016 | 15:55
Companies: #hgst #seagate #western-digital
Seagate has announced the launch of an 8TB drive designed specifically for network attached storage (NAS) applications, following its 8TB Archive HDD launch in late 2014.
Having lost the performance race to solid-state devices, spinning-rust manufacturers are competing purely on capacity. Rivals Seagate and HGST have been trading blows in the high end of the market, but the former's first 8TB launch was designed with a very specific application in mind: archive storage, with one-off sequential writes and very rare reads. Part of this is down to the interesting technology in use, shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which is the secret of increasing the drive's areal density over traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR).
While the 8TB Archive drive offered plenty of storage at a low cost to those willing to work around its foibles, Seagate's latest launch is for those who prefer a less esoteric drive. Optimised for network attached storage use, with 24/7 run-time, the drive is designed to compete with the Red family from rival Western Digital - and comes while WD's Reds top out at 6GB, Seagate's latest NAS drive offers a full 8TB in a 3.5" form factor.
The 8TB NAS HDD joins the company's existing 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB drives, each of which offer a 180TB a year workload rate limit and a one million hour mean time between failure (MTBF), backed up by a three year warranty. As with its previous drives, the warranty can be extended to include data recovery should the drive fail - at, naturally, an additional cost.
Seagate has not yet announced pricing for the drive, which is shipping to select customers now with a view to wide availability by the end of the quarter, but expect it to fetch a hefty premium over the 8TB Archive variant.
Having lost the performance race to solid-state devices, spinning-rust manufacturers are competing purely on capacity. Rivals Seagate and HGST have been trading blows in the high end of the market, but the former's first 8TB launch was designed with a very specific application in mind: archive storage, with one-off sequential writes and very rare reads. Part of this is down to the interesting technology in use, shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which is the secret of increasing the drive's areal density over traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR).
While the 8TB Archive drive offered plenty of storage at a low cost to those willing to work around its foibles, Seagate's latest launch is for those who prefer a less esoteric drive. Optimised for network attached storage use, with 24/7 run-time, the drive is designed to compete with the Red family from rival Western Digital - and comes while WD's Reds top out at 6GB, Seagate's latest NAS drive offers a full 8TB in a 3.5" form factor.
The 8TB NAS HDD joins the company's existing 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB drives, each of which offer a 180TB a year workload rate limit and a one million hour mean time between failure (MTBF), backed up by a three year warranty. As with its previous drives, the warranty can be extended to include data recovery should the drive fail - at, naturally, an additional cost.
Seagate has not yet announced pricing for the drive, which is shipping to select customers now with a view to wide availability by the end of the quarter, but expect it to fetch a hefty premium over the 8TB Archive variant.
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