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Seagate to sell 8TB HDD for $260

Written by James Delahunty @ 12 Dec 2014 2:31 User comments (15)

Seagate to sell 8TB HDD for $260 Seagate will start selling a hard disk drive (HDD) in January with a massive 8TB capacity and it is expected to cost $260 or below.
Designed for reliability rather than performance, the 3.5-inch Seagate 8TB Archive HDD has a reduced spindle speed of 5,900 RPM and the average read/write is only 150MB/s. That is significantly slower than modern HDDs and way slower than a decent solid state disk (SSD).

This drive is build simply for storage though so that doesn't matter all that much, and at $260 it would be a nice purchase for an NAS.

The hard drive will start selling mid-January.

The extra capacity and low cost are achieved with Seagate's SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) Technology. Here is a video explaining it.

Tags: Seagate
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15 user comments

112.12.2014 15:00

I still think about the 40MB HDD that I bought back in the 90's for around $500. They've come a long way in a fairly short period of time. Imagine what we'll have in another 10 years.

Up to 20TB in the video. Imagine how long it would take to clone that beast! haha

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 12 Dec 2014 @ 3:03

212.12.2014 15:33

I'm on HD-Video lately and 2TB goes like water.
I just hope they start working in more affordable solid state drive(s) with big capacity.

312.12.2014 15:42

Whats the life span and warranty? The larger it is the longer it better last.....

412.12.2014 20:31

This hits especially close to home, as one of my archive HDs just click-of-doomed to death a week ago ^^' ...

512.12.2014 20:35

Originally posted by Bozobub:
This hits especially close to home, as one of my archive HDs just click-of-doomed to death a week ago ^^' ...
I watch smart info like a hawk if I see an error it gets replaced!

612.12.2014 20:39

That's probably overreaction. Some block swaps are normal; it's REPEATED errors (especially in a short time) that's a definite tell of impending doom.

That said, it's not a HUGE deal, in that all of the content involved was pirated; just about all of it is completely replaceable. Karma's certainly, however, a bitch - lol...

Of course, this depends on your setup and what you're archiving. In a business and/or "mission-critical" or irreplaceable data application, I can definitely see your point.

712.12.2014 20:44

Originally posted by Bozobub:
That's probably overreaction. Some block swaps are normal; it's REPEATED errors (especially in a short time) that's a definite tell of impending doom.

That said, it's not a HUGE deal, in that all of the content involved was pirated; just about all of it is completely replaceable. Karma's certainly, however, a bitch - lol...

Of course, this depends on your setup and what you're archiving. In a business and/or "mission-critical" or irreplaceable data application, I can definitely see your point.
I do not like rebuilding 4TB+ of organized crap I have collected online. Besides selling it with a error nets me 3rd the price for a new replacement half the time ^^

813.12.2014 12:34

God forbid if you have to defrag that dam thing worse if you have to clone afterwards,a sector by sector clone :P


This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 13 Dec 2014 @ 12:36

913.12.2014 12:49

Originally posted by ZippyDSM:
I watch smart info like a hawk if I see an error it gets replaced!

You and me both! :D However, I won't be trusting Seagate for a while yet. They need to remove the stain from their name. I read about a lot of failures, and the only two I've owned, were failing in a short time. I've never personally owned a WD that failed, except a 10 year old 80GB.

1013.12.2014 12:50

I love how they claim that this 8TB drive is "Designed for reliability rather than performance"

Whatevs.......this is B.S. for "We have developed an 8TB drive that would be best for archiving BECAUSE we haven't figured out how to keep this thing from becoming BRUTALLY HOT so we are dumbing down to 150MBps and 5900RPM to keep it SOMEWHAT cool.

While this drive is dope, it's gonna run way hot I imagine!!

Hopefully it's better than the usual 'expect-to-fail-soon' Seagate crap drives. WD is really the way to go and SSDs are even better. Now.......we just need an 8TB SSD

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 13 Dec 2014 @ 12:52

1113.12.2014 13:13

Originally posted by hearme0:
Hopefully it's better than the usual 'expect-to-fail-soon' Seagate crap drives. WD is really the way to go and SSDs are even better. Now.......we just need an 8TB SSD
I thinks it's just hit and miss with certain batches. I've gone through a lot of 2TB WD drives and stopped using them. I've been using 2-4TB Seagates and they've been running great.

It's been like this for decades. New batch of Seagate drives are failing, we switch to WD. New WD's start failing, we switch back to Seagate. It was the same with Samgung, Hitachi, etc.. Although, I have never had a problem with any batch of WD Raptors/Velociraptors!
This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 13 Dec 2014 @ 1:16

1213.12.2014 14:43

I just had a 1TB Seagate that is trash can material now go down just after the 2 year warranty and I've had this happen more often recently with Seagate drives over WD's. Now that doesn't mean they are horrible as their failure rates are still low over all, I've just been unlucky with them lately. I do prefer WD's for Desktops but I won't use them in RAID arrays as they are worse in that arena.

I keep my valuable data/apps on raw drives so that I only loose a few things if my drive(s) go south. And I keep stuff on DVD's & BD's as well but I normally have two working systems with the same stuff on both so I have multiple levels of backup.

The new 850 series SSD's are the way to go and they are coming down in price too, even for the 1TB drives.

1313.12.2014 20:31

My WD black hdd benches at 100MB ps in crystal disk mark. 150MB p/s if fast enough to serve up video. Don't need an ssd for that. My WD green drives do a fine fine of serving video.

1413.12.2014 21:00

A fast drive will be in excess of 2x that if not more, like up to 450MB in a non-RAID Enterprise Disk system. In a RAID 5 or hybrid of that it multiplies by the amount of drives you have not counting the spares. Which is where the 5900 rpm drives excel as a low cost reliable NAS system. Drive manufactures know that more and more the kids are setting up multiple disk HTPC servers and that is why these drives have come about.

1514.12.2014 05:30

sounds like a recipe for a huge disaster. no thanks.

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