Seagate to launch affordable 8TB Archive consumer Hard Drive

Seagate's new 8 Terabyte Archive HDD hard drive will launch in January 2015.

Storage is one of the few things where regular platter-based drives beat Solid State Drives in. Not only do these hard drives offer storage capacities at the higher end that SSDs don't offer yet, they are also much cheaper when you compare the price per Gigabyte or price per Terabyte.

There are only a couple of hard drive makers left, most notable Seagate and Western Digital (which owns HGST as well) that produce platter-based drives and it comes down to selecting a drive or drives from one of the two companies.

If you purchase a hard drive right now, storage options go up to 6 Terabyte both internally and externally. The Western Digital Red 6 TB NAS drive ships with a capacity of 6 Terabyte for example and so does the Seagate's Desktop HDD 6TB.

If you require more storage than that, you still have options. Depending on your requirements, you can set up a RAID environment for example, install multiple hard drives individually, or use network-attached storage.

Both companies announced new drives with improved storage recently. Western Digital unveiled the world's first 10TB Helium-filled hard drive for example (which is not available yet). Seagate on the other hand announced a consumer drive with a maximum capacity of 8 Terabyte.

Western Digital's high-end HGST Ultrastar He8 drive with 8 Terabyte of storage has been out for a while  but it is priced for the Enterprise market at around $1000.

Seagate's new 8TB ARchive drive, which the company plans to make available in January 2015 to the general public, is more affordable as several sites have reported that it will be available for $260 when it launches.This is less than Seagate is currently asking for its 6TB Archive HDD drive and would put the drive at about 3 cent per Gigabyte.

The linked Amazon store page for the drive lists a pack of 20 Seagate 8TB drives for the price of $5336 which comes down to a unit price of $266.8 per drive.

The device has been designed for  reliability and not performance according to Seagate which the average data rate of 150 MB/s confirms. This is a side-effect of Shingled Magnetic Recording, a new technology that sacrifices performance for areal density.

Storage requirements differ from user to user obviously. While some are perfectly fine with a 64 Gigabyte or 128 Gigabyte Solid State Drive and nothing else, others put their whole movie collection, regular backups or other large files on drives and require lots of storage because of this.

The low price of Seagate's new 8 Terabyte hard drive will appeal to computer users. I'd wait until first tests arrive before I'd pick one up though, but that is just me.

Now You: How much storage do you have?