Seagate, a company known for making many of the world’s hard drives for eons, just announced that it is shipping the world’s first 8TB hard disk drive. Seagate made the announcement in this official blog post.
It wasn’t too long ago that Seagate announced a 6TB 3.5-inch hard drive, and just like that disk, this new 3.5-inch 8TB model is geared toward data centers and big businesses. As more and more people get online, and as more content is consumed on the Internet, the servers used to store and run those sites and services need to grow as well. That’s where drives like Seagate’s new 3.5-inch 8TB monster come in.
Related: Seagate release 6TB 3.5-inch hard drive for enterprise
“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,” Seagate exec Scott Horn says. “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 centers.”
On top of this drive’s massive size, Seagate claims that the drive is super energy efficient, stating that it has the best watts-per-GB ratio in the enterprise storage space.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem to mean much for the average consumer. However, as the cost of running data centers rises, paired with the never-ending growth in Internet and cloud-based content and services that rely on servers to run, it’s important for hard drives to keep expanding in size as well. Otherwise, the rising costs associated with running these data centers could, at least in part, be passed on to the average Joe and Jane.
Seagate says that it is shipping its new 8TB 3.5-inch hard drives to “select customers” right now, and that they’ll be widely available sometime sometime this fall or winter. However, Seagate has not announced a price for these drives.
