Seagate launches 8-terabyte hard drives for $ 260 each

On Habré and Geektimes several times published materials describing high-capacity hard drives. Such discs are developed by several companies at once, and there are not so many commercial samples. One of the companies that announced the availability of hard drives with a capacity of 6-8-10 TB is HGST. This company has an interesting technology for creating such disks, with filling the insides of a sealed body with helium.

Of course, this technology cannot be cheap (after all, the seven-disk structure is also used). The result - for a 8TB hard drive, you need to pay $ 800. But there is a much less expensive option: Seagate announced the start of sales of its 8 TB drives for just $ 260.
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In this case, Seagate does not fill the case with anything, using a standard HDA. But the increased hard disk capacity is due to the use of SMR technology ( shingled magnetic recording ). Data is recorded here on a disk very close to each other, there is practically no interval between tracks, as is done when recording in the usual way.



Such a dense recording allows you to place 1.33 TB of data on a single magnetic disk. 8 TB, therefore, is placed on only six plates, instead of 7 or 8, which reduces the cost of production of disks of this type. Of course, with this type of data placement, the overall performance and read / write speeds decrease. But such disks are mainly used not for installation in super-productive systems, but for archiving large amounts of data. In addition, not all users need super-productive systems.

As a result - in this case, you need to pay only 3.25 cents per gigabyte. At the time of publication of the article, the discs have already set off for retailers. On Amazon, the first batch of disks will appear on January 8 (though only in “packs” of 20 disks each). The price for such a batch is 5336 US dollars (267 dollars for each disc).