Seagate's new 8TB drive: is it for you?
This is a bulk storage drive. Optimized for $/GB and total cost of ownership, not performance.
A slower and less costly interface - 6Gb/s SATA - implies a 7200 RPM drive. But one feature stands out:
. . . for archive workloads, it features multi-drive RV tolerance for consistent enterprise-class performance in high density environments.
RV is rotational vibration, a problem when drive seeks of multiple drives synchronize, generating high-frequency harmonics. Uncorrected RV leads to read and especially write errors.
No word on pricing, but a first quarter retail price is typically high. Expect ≈$500 before dropping online to $250 after 3-6 months.
The Storage Bits take
Congratulations to Seagate for upping the capacity limit. Drive capacity has been growing slowly for the last several years, hurting disks in their competition with fast SSDs. With this announcement capacity appears to be growing faster than the last 4 years.
This drive is clearly designed for the big cloud providers who need high density, not high performance. The latter market is owned by SSDs now.
If you use cloud services then yes, this is good news for you. Less-good news for vendors of on-premise storage, whose storage will look even less competitive after the next round of cloud price declines.
Comments welcome, as always. Do you need this at home or in your office?