Seagate Releases Largest Consumer NAS HDD Yet

Even with SSDs driving the news cycle more and more, HDDs are still around and kicking. One of two major HDD firms Seagate has just launched their highest capacity NAS HDD with a whopping 8TB of storage space. The drive is oriented towards NAS users with NAS-specific features and RAID and comes with a 3-year warranty.

With 8TB of capacity, the new drive will be perfect for the home NAS in creating a personal cloud or simply for mass multimedia storage. Another major market is the burgeoning SOHO segment as more and more people start running small business’s and working from home.

The drive operates at the standard 7200rpm without resorting any exotic methods like helium fill. Using standard PMR (parallel magnetic recording), it packs 1.33TB per platter with a total of 6 platters. This backed up by 256MB of DRAM cache and connected over an SATA 3 interface, not the SAS commonly used by enterprise. Peak transfer rate should be about 216MB/s though that is a best case scenario unlikely to be encountered in real life. The rest of the lineup includes 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB and 6TB drives for those that don’t need such a massive drive. the only problem for such a large drive is backing up and restoring in case of drive failure.