Data Backup Digest

There was a time when having megabytes of storage on your computer was considered a luxury. That then turned to gigabytes and then terabytes. Gone are the days when having a drive that contained a single one of those units was exciting. In fact, not only were they exciting, but they were expensive on release. If you could go back twenty years and show someone how much a1TB drive costs then they’d be amazed.

How much do you think an 8TB would set you back nowadays? The answer is $260, thanks to Seagate launching their new 3.5 inch hard drive. This is a drastic difference to competitors, like HGST who currently offer a hard drive with the same capacity for $1000 – almost four times as expensive.

At $260 (or roughly £165), this is certainly one incredibly cheap drive. Although it’s known that storage prices will only ever continue to drop over time thanks to innovation, that’s still a drastic leap over what HGST offer.

However, this does come with one caveat. The new drive belongs to Seagate’s Archive HDD range. This means that it doesn’t really boast great speeds. For example, while the average SSD has a read speed of around 550 MB/s, the new HDD offering from Seagate only reads at 150 MB/s.

However, that’s not necessarily a knock on the drive. This isn’t something that is being positioned as something for everyday use – the clue is in the ‘archive’ title. Seagate are aiming this drive at those (sensible) people who backup their data and have a lot of it that they need to store.

Backing up is something that every single person who stores their personal data on a computer should do. Unless you don’t care about it, that is, but chances are you do. If you keep your photos, music or documents on your computer then you need to have a backup process in place. Drives aren’t fool-proof (in fact, many are prone to failures) and they’re capable of taking your data down with them.

As such, this new drive from Seagate would make a perfect backup drive. Not only does it offer ample space, ensuring that it’ll last you a long time, but it also comes at a cheap and cost effective price. What can get better than that?

“Public and private data centres are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content. Seagate’s new 8TB HDD provides IT managers with a new option for improving storage density in the data centre, thus helping them to tackle one of the largest and fastest growing data categories within enterprise storage economically,” said John Ryding, IDC’s Research Vice President for Hard Disk Drives.

Seagate claim that their new drive enables significant system-level TCO systems with the best cost-per-TB and also the maximum storage efficiency with lowest watts-per-TB. As such, not only is this drive cheap to buy, but it’s also cost effective to run.

More information about the new drive, along with details on where to buy it, can be found at Seagate's official website.