Seagate's new 8TB hard drive is the first of its kind

Seagate has hit a new storage milestone with its recently unveiled 8TB hard drive disk, the first of its kind to start shipping. The company calls this an "important step forward", saying its new offering meets the increasing data-heavy demands of our modern cloud-centric world.

The new 8TB offering is a 3.5-inch drive, and the maker is hawking it at cloud providers and others revolving around bulk data storage. Said IDC's John Rydning, "Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content."

He points towards the 8TB drive as a solution for addressing this issue. Many benefits for using the high-capacity drive are given, including lowering the cost of powering an organization's storage drives. Overall operating costs go down as a result, says Seagate, with its drive offering "the best Watts/GB for enterprise" data storage.

The drive, among other things, uses the SATA 6Gb/s interface, which Seagate hails as bringing easy implementation for whomever uses the drive. Only "select" unspecified customers are seeing the 8TB drive ship for now, but Seagate says it'll be making it more widely available in Q4.

SOURCE: Seagate