In an attempt to appease businesses, both small and medium-sized, Seagate has revealed a new line of 8TB hard drives. These HDDs — which consist of the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5, Seagate Enterprise NAS, and the Seagate Kinetic — reportedly pack “world’s highest capacity, most reliable, and highest performance storage solutions available,” according to a press release sent to us by the company.
Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at Seagate, expressed his excitement about the new lineup, explaining, “Customers today need storage solutions to support a diverse, and sometimes very specialized, set of applications and workload requirements.”
He boasts that when developing new products, Seagate designers “look closely at the type of data being stored, performance needs, power requirements, environmental operating conditions, network topologies, uptime demand and more, to ensure [their] customers receive the right storage technology for the job.” In doing this, Seagate hopes to deliver “the most compelling 8TB portfolio available in the industry.”
While the 8TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ drive promises a 100 percent increase in random read/write performance compared to previous generations, it’s also 15 percent quicker in sequential read/write with the ability to double cache from 128MB to 256MB. Additionally, it bears support for 550TB of disk writing per year with configuration options consisting of either 12Gbps SAS or 6Gbps SATA.
The network-attached storage (NAS) variant apparently brings 300TB of disk writing each year with only 6Gbps SATA, also on a 3.5-inch HDD. The Enterprise NAS uses 9th generation conventional drive technology outfitted with layers of 1.33TB platters internally.
Both the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ and the Enterprise NAS (ENAS) are expected to ship this October.
Lastly, the Kinetic 8TB drive is more focused on total cost of ownership than sheer numerical specifications. Based on an open-source project also called Kinetic, this HDD is equipped with two Ethernet points allowing for a direction network connection, negating the need for a storage server machine and drastically lowering company costs.
It does this using a simple Key/Value interface, which reduces the costs of capital equipment, power consumption, and human expenses that often accompany the use of traditional storage servers by “up to 70 percent.”
The Kinetic HDD is set to launch in January 2016.
All in all, these drives seem like an efficient way for businesses to expand upon their current storage systems. Whether or not Seagate will provide an affordable means of doing so remains to be seen as it’s yet to reveal any pricing information. We should know more on pricing later this year as we approach the initial October launch window.