Seagate New 8TB Hard Drive with Shingled Magnetic Recording Technology

Seagate recently announced a new series of hard drives which includes a new technology called SMR. This new technology allows Seagate to increase capacity which now goes up to 8TB.

You can never have enough space for your images and videos. This is why we have been seeing gradual increase in hard drive capacities for years despite reaching ever growing technological difficulties related to writing and retrieving information from minuscule areas on the surface of hard drives.

Seagate new Shingled Magnetic Recording, or SMR (and no this is not a reference to the sickness but rather to shingles like the ones on your roof), is a revolutionary technology which adds more than 25% capacity on HHDs by maximizing the number of tracks per inch on a single disk. Instead of laying tracks next to each other SMR overlap them – just like shingles.

The new series currently has capacities of 5TB, 6TB and 8TB. All spin at 5900 RPM (not the fastest drives around) and are designed for cloud storage (although we see no reason why you can’t use them for you home NAS solution as well.

 

The new 8TB HDD monster from Seagate

Seagate-8TB-SMR

The new drives will come with 128MB cache, has an average read/write throughput of 150MB/sec (190MB/sec max) and 3 year warranty as well as a fairly high MTBF (mean time between failures) of 800,000 hours which should not be a surprise as they are meant for enterprise use.

Pricing however is a (nice) suprise – the 8TB drive should run you $260 (although currently on pre-order you can get them on Amazon for a bit more).

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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