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.
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?
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.
Knock on wood but so far my 6 3TB Seagate drives are doing fine. I was a Hitachi fanatic for years so I still back up my Seagates religiously.
Failure rates generally go up with capacity. Most people in the market for this drive right now will be able to fill it quickly and protect the data with some form of raid.
But yeah, I'd love for the failure rates to be lower, for everyone.
That sounds dubious. Need a citation.
I guess the only thing I can think of where this would make sense is that higher capacity means smaller magnetic domains that can fade away faster over time... but still, I'd rather see some study on that.
Much simpler. The more disks you squeeze into a given form factor, the more heat is generated spinning them. Heat kills.
