Seagate Unveils Series of 8TB Hard Disk Drives

Amazing Growth in Data Requires Innovative New Solutions

In a development that has broad implications for storage systems across the enterprise, Seagate today unveiled a series of 8TB hard disk drives (HDDs).

While HDDs are clearly being supplanted by solid-state disk (SSD) drives in high-performance applications, the bulk of the data being stored in and out of the cloud continues to reside on HDDs.

Joni Clark, global NAS segment manager for Seagate Technology, says that organizations of all sizes will need to be able to collectively store somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 zettabytes of data. There’s simply no scenario where HDDs will not play a significant role in storing that data through the rest of this decade and beyond, says Clark.

In addition to being able to consolidate more data in a concentrated amount of space, Clark says the 3.5-in form factor version of the 8TB Enterprise Capacity drives are 100 percent faster in terms of random read/write performance.

Based on Shingled Magnetic Recording technology that Seagate has been developing to increase the amount of data that can be stored on any given HDD, Clark said enterprise IT organizations will soon be able to store over 95 petabytes of data using 84 drives in a 5u rack.

While not every IT organization will want to consolidate data storage to that degree for both performance and disaster recovery reasons, having that capability should enable those IT organizations to reduce both the physical amount of space storage consumes in the data center as well as the amount of energy being consumed by that storage.