“Shingled” Technology Makes 8TB HDDs Super Cheap
Ashley Allen / 10 years ago
Seagate has pioneered a new system that has significantly reduced the price of multiple-terabyte hard drives. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology means that a drive can fit more data on its platters, storing up to 8TB for the price of around 3 cents per gigabyte.
The only drawback? Packing so much on to an SMR drive means sacrificing speed. The average hard drive disk runs at 7,200rpm, whereas an SMR drive spins at 5,900rpm, with an average read-write speed of 150MB/sec. In practical terms, an SMR drive is great for, say, storing files as a secondary data storage source, but shouldn’t act the primary drive for running an operating system.
Seagate will start shipping the 8TB SMR drives for the bargain price of $260 in January 2015.
Source: TechCrunch
