Seagate Ships 8TB Shingled Magnetic Recording HDD

Hard drives are constantly increasing in performance and capacity. Seagate is one of the main producers of hard drives and the company is now set to ship its latest offering using a new recording technology that allows the company to cram more data onto the same number of physical platters inside the drive. The new tech is called shingled magnetic recording or SMR.

The first SMR drive from Seagate is an 8TB unit that is ready to ship now and will sell for $260. That makes the price per gigabyte for storage on the drive a bit over $.03. The drive also ships with a 3 year warranty and boasts low power consumption.

The 8TB drive falls into a family that Seagate calls the Archive HDD hinting at the intended use of storing data for long periods of time. That means that the drive is more focused on using less power and reliability than performance. The Archive HDD family spins at 5900rpm and have a 128MB cache.

Average read and write speed is 150MB/sec and the maximum is 190MB/s. These certainly aren't drives you will want to use as your exclusive storage option. The MTBF rating is 800,000 hours. The SMR tech used in the drive can cram up to 1.33TB onto a single platter.

SOURCE: ExtremeTech