What are you looking for ?
Infinidat
Articles_top

First 8TB HDD, by Seagate

3.5-inch unit shipping next quarter

Seagate Technology plc is shipping the world’s first 8TB HDD drive.

An important step forward in storage, the 8TB HDD drive provides scale-out data infrastructures with capacity, energy-efficiency and low TCO for cloud content, object storage and backup DR storage.

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. 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,” said Scott Horn, Seagate VP marketing. “Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the world’s first 8TB HDD, a ground-breaking new solution for meeting the increased capacities needed to support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage.

A cornerstone for growing capacities in multiple applications, the 8TB HDD delivers bulk storage solutions for online content storage providing customers with the highest capacity density needed to address an increasing amount of unstructured data in an industry-standard 3.5-inch HDD. Providing up to 8TB in a single drive slot, the drive delivers rack density, within an existing footprint, for efficient data center floor space usage.

Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research VP for HDDs. “Seagate’s new 8TB HDD provides IT managers with a new option for improving storage density in the data center, thus helping them to tackle one of the largest and fastest growing data categories within enterprise storage economically.”

The 8TB drive increases system capacity using fewer components for increased system and staffing efficiencies while lowering power costs. With its low operating power consumption, the drive reliably conserves energy thereby reducing overall operating costs. Helping customers economically store data, it boasts the best Watts/GB for enterprise bulk storage in the industry.

Cleversafe is excited to once again partner with Seagate to deliver to our customers what is truly an innovative storage solution. Delivering absolute lowest cost/TB along with the performance and reliability required for massive scale applications, the new 8TB HDD drive is ideal for meeting the needs of our enterprise and service provider customers who demand optimized hardware and the cost structure needed for massive scale out,” said Tom Shirley, senior VP of R&D, Cleversafe.

Outfitted with enterprise reliability and support for archive workloads, it features multi-drive RV tolerance for consistent enterprise performance in high density environments.

The drive also incorporates a 6Gb SATA interface for cost-effective, easy system integration in both private and public data centers.

Shipping drives to select customers now with wide scale availability next quarter.

Comments

Commenting Seagate's fiscal 4Q14 financial results last July, chairman CEO Steve Luczo already said: "We have also delivered 8TB customer development units to major customers and cloud service providers and the initial customer feedback has been very positive."

Here is the official announcement of the world's higher capacity HDD but with no details on the technology used: traditional Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) with slower writing, or expansive helium-filled units?

For sure, it's not helium, HGST being the only one in this technology with the first 6TB HDD released last year. Then this year, Seagate also announced a 6TB device with PMR as well as Western Digital (WD Green),  but Seagate seems to use SMR. (The third HDD maker, Toshiba, is blocked at 5TB.)

Tom Coughlin, chairman of the Storage Visions and Creative Storage Conferences as well as the Flash Memory Summit, wrote in Forbes: "The 8TB drive may be extending the storage capacity possible with the 6TB non-SMR HDD by using SMR, where concentric tracks are partially overwritten on top of each other."

Next step will probably not be 9TB but 10TB, a milestone in the history of the HDD industry.

With 8TB, HDDs continue to surpass solid-state disks in term of capacity but the gap is diminishing. SanDisk announced a 4TB SSD last July.

 

 

 

 

MILESTONES IN THE HARD DISK DRIVE INDUSTRY

 

First HDD at capacity equal
to or more than
Company Model Year*
5MB IBM 350 Ramac   1956   
10MB IBM 1301 1962
100MB IBM 2302-3 1965
500MB STC 8800 Super Disk 1975
1GB IBM 3380 1981
100GB Seagate Barracuda 180 2001
500GB HGST 7K500 2005
1TB HGST 7K1000 2007
1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 2008
2TB WD Caviar Green WD20EADS 2009
3TB Seagate External GoFlex Desk 2010
4TB Hitachi GST (WD) Ultrastar 7K4000 2012
6TB HGST (WD) Ultrastar He6 2013
8TB Seagate 8TB 2014

* Year of actual first shipment, not announcement
(Sources: Disk/Trend and StorageNewsletter.com)

 

Articles_bottom
AIC
ATTO
OPEN-E