Data Backup Digest

Data is getting larger and hard drives are struggling to keep up. Whereas in the past people only needed gigabytes of data for their hard drives, this has soon moved into the terabytes. Those who play a lot of games on their computer will understand the struggle – game installs only continue to rise and many are finding their hard drives pinched for space.

Seagate have recently announced an industry first as they ship an 8TB 3.5-inch hard disk drive. The highest capacity drive previously available on the market was 6TB, selling at a cool $300. Although this 8TB drive is currently only available for enterprise use in data centres, it isn’t unlikely that it’ll be available to consumers at some point in the future.

Although that time in the future may be some way away, Seagate will want to ensure that they’re the first to offer it to the consumer market. At the moment the 8TB drive is only for specific enterprise users; more general availability for businesses will come later in the year.

At the moment there has been no price point announced for the 8TB drive, but it’ll likely be fairly steep considering the market and the uniqueness of the product.

“As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data,” said Seagate’s Vice President of Marketing, Scott Horn “This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centres.”

According to Seagate, their new drive has low power consumption and helps keeps running costs down due to the energy conservation. The drive also features multi-drive RV tolerance in order to offer consistent performance. It also has a SATA 6GB/second interface, allowing it o easily integrate into private and public data centres.

Top Tech News reached out to Charles King, the principal analyst at Pund-IT, in order to find out his thoughts on Seagate’s latest drive. He noted that the news isn’t exactly surprising, since data companies are constantly pushing to pack the largest capacity into the smallest space they can. He did, however, add that Seagate’s main competitor, Western Digital, have had their largest drive passed by 30 percent with Seagate’s 8TB offering.

“According to Seagate, not only is this a higher density drive but by reducing the number of components in the drive they’ve made it more energy efficient,” King said. “Depending on how much more energy efficient these drives get, it’s going to continue to put pressure on the tape industry - which is already feeling a lot of pressure.”

The tape industry has seen a decline, although some companies still prefer to use it for archiving due to its low cost and relative reliability. However, when companies like Seagate are able to pack so much capacity into hard disk drives, with the price of drives overall dropping as they do, tape may soon become obsolete.

Seagate’s 8TB drive is available to some enterprise customers now.