Maximum PC: 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?
Seagate, using its new shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to cram more data into fewer platters, is preparing to launch an 8TB hard drive priced at just $260. For that low-low price (just over 3 cents per gig!) you get a three-year warranty and very low power consumption — but certainly not performance. This 8TB drive is all about long-term storage and backups — pair it with a new SSD like the Samsung 850 Pro or 850 Evo and you’d have a very flexible, cost-effective storage setup.
My first hard drive was 10MB. I used a DOS program called "doublespace" to take it to a whopping 20MB. My mind was blown. It then took twice as long to read/write to/from the drive. That was the tradeoff apparently. It was still faster than playing Kings Quest from the floppy disks though.... And all of this was only 25 years ago. crazy
The problem is as soon as one gets close to filling up that 8TB hard drive, the drive will probably die, as do most Seagates (good old Maxtor technology) after a bit of use.