Seagate launches 8TB enterprise hard drives

Seagate is unveiling a whole family of 8-terabyte hard disk drives for enterprise applications. The new drives will address markets such as enterprise computers, network-attached storage, and “kinetic hard disk drives.”

The aim is to lower the total cost of ownership for storage in a variety of markets. The Cupertino, Calif.-based storage giant is targeting everyone from small businesses to large enterprises with the portfolio of 8TB drives.

“Customers today need storage solutions to support a diverse, and sometimes very specialized, set of applications and workload requirements,” said Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at Seagate, in a statement. “In designing our products, we look closely at the type of data being stored, performance needs, power requirements, environmental operating conditions, network topologies, uptime demand and more, to ensure our customers receive the right storage technology for the job. This thoughtful approach has enabled us to deliver the most compelling 8TB portfolio available in the industry.”

The first product is a 3.5-inch hard disk drive with 8TB of capacity. The performance is 100 percent higher than the random read/write performance of the previous generation of 6TB drives. Supermicro said it will have a line of storage equipment available using the Seagate drives.

Seagate is also launching its enterprise network-attached storage (NAS HDD) for small businesses that plan on growing rapidly. The product is more densely packed into a tower or rack-mount solution, and it has lower overall power consumption, as well.

And Seagate is launching its latest Kinetic HDD, or hard drives for cloud data centers that need to access storage at extremely high speeds. The Kinetic devices allow computers to access data quickly, without going through lots of layers of software. Seagate estimates the overall cost savings from the Kinetic drives to be about 70 percent. A terabyte has 1,000 gigabytes, or a thousand billion bytes of storage.

In a conference call with the press, Seagate product marketing manager Joni Clark said that by 2020,  44 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created globally, and 13 ZB will need to be stored. Only about 6.5 ZB will be available to handle that capacity, Clark said.

“That’s a huge amount, and most of that data will live in the cloud,” Clark said. “We can’t build enough storage capacity to store 13 zettabytes.”

Seagate has shipped 2.4 billion drives to date, or 17 percent more than its nearest competitor, according to STX market research. The drives are shipping at future dates.