Seagate releases 8TB hard drive

Seagate  has decided that the world needs hard drives which can store 8TB.

The 8TB HDD comes five months after Western Digital had released the first ever 6TB HDD, so the company clearly thinks we are running out of space.

Apparently the 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and  features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centres.

At this point it is not clear if the drive uses PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.

Seagate vice president of marketing Scott Horn said that as the 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 centres,” he said.

He thinks the new drive will support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage.

Unfortunately, Seagate did not announce the retail price for its 8TB HDD though the company claims that the new hard drive has “the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.” In otherwords while the drive is expensive it will be cheaper than owning two 4 TB machines.