Seagate has just announced its ‘Archive HDD’ series which offers densities of 5TB, 6TB, and 8TB for a cut price. Not only is 8TB grabbing the headlines, it costs $260.
Seagate is bringing out shingled magnetic recording, which it thinks will be the next new thing. Having had shingles we don’t think it is something we would like our hard-drive to suffer from, but at those densities and prices we are included to let the thing suffer.
SMR aligns drive tracks in a singled pattern. With this design, Seagate is able to cram much more storage into the same physical area. Seagate isn’t the first out the door with an 8TB model, however, as HGST released one earlier this year. In lieu of a design like SMR, HGST decided to go the helium route, allowing it to pack more platters into a drive.
SMR is a little more elegant, and a bit cheaper.
Like most other high-density drives, Seagate’s Archive HDD series spins at about 5400 RPM which is a little on the slow side. It means it is good for regular storage, not data like games or applications.
Still you might need a couple of these drives — 8TB is a lot of data to lose at once and you are going to need a lot of redundancy if you buy one.
