Seagate Goes Big, Ships Industry's First 8TB Hard Drive

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Go big or go home

Anybody remember when hard drives were measured in megabytes? How far we've come from those primitive days in computing. Further distancing us from the stone age of storage, Seagate today has begun shipping the world's first 8TB hard drive. The feat comes a mere five months after Western Digital's HGST subsidiary shipped the first 6TB HDD -- could a capacity war be at hand?
We're not sure, though Seagate did previously mention 10TB models in the not-too-distant future. For now, 8TB is as capacious as single HDDs get in the 3.5-inch form factor. Details of the new drive are in short supply, though Seagate did confirm that it sports a SATA 6Gbps interface and features multi-drive RV tolerance for use in high-density environments such as data centers.
"As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers," said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. "Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the world’s first 8TB HDD, a ground-breaking new solution for meeting the increased capacities needed to support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage."
Seagate seems to be taking aim at data centers and cloud computing providers, though the thought of slapping several of these drives in a NAS box has us salivating at the sheer amount of storage space.
In any event, the 8TB drive is shipping now to select customers and will be more widely available next quarter.
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