Seagate releases 8TB hard drives perfect for NAS

Following on from Mushkin’s 4TB SSD, Seagate has announced their 8TB hard drive.

The new larger capacity discs will be perfect for those storing large video files and complete artist discographies in lossless audio formats on Network Accessed Storage (NAS) systems.

These new NAS drives will be available in 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8TB capacities and are suitable for 1-8 bay NAS enclosures.

Seagate even throws in a 3 year warranty with a 180TB/year workload limit.

David Chiang, General Manager of Business Division, QNAP Systems, Inc said

Our customers are finding themselves under more pressure than ever as the volume of data they need to deal with continues to increase dramatically,” “QNAP is focused on delivering scalable and reliable NAS solutions to address these needs, giving users the confidence that their information is secure and available. The new Seagate NAS HDD 8TB will offer professionals a huge capacity with which to easily manage this growing amount of data.”

High-capacity PMR platters, 7200 RPM spindle speed as well as massive 256 MB DRAM cache will help the new 6TB and 8 TB drives to offer very high random read performance, which should be useful not only for NAS environments, but for desktops as well.

Previously Seagate offered 8TB drives for archive/nearline, enterprise capacity and enterprise NAS applications. Such drives are optimised for servers, racks, maximum reliability, etc., which comes at a price. The new 8TB HDD for small and medium businesses (SMBs) as well as creative professionals are designed for tower enclosures with one to eight bays and are essentially the first hard drives with such capacity that are optimised for desktop applications. The drives are also fully compatible with select NAS products from companies like ASUSTOR, QNAP, Synology and Thecus.

These new drives are currently available to business users and are expected to become available to the consumer market at the end of Q1 2016. Pricing is yet to be announced by Seagate but their 8TB Archive V2 HDD goes for around £180.