Seagate's 8TB hard disk drive is now listed on several online retailers. The HDDs are sold by the "Archive Label" and are available with and without hardware based encryption. According to Seagate the drives can achieve speeds up to 190MB/s. The introductory price is around relative low at about $267 which includes a three year warranty.
The 3.5" 8TB disks spin at 5900 round per minute (RPM) and are equipped with a SATA-3 interface and 128MB cache memory. The Seagate Archive ST8000AS0002 comes without hardware based encryption, while the ST8000AS0012 is able to encrypted the stored data. According to the manufacturer the drives are able to transfer data with speeds of up to 190MB/s while the average throughput is specified at 150 MB/s.
The 8TB drives contain six platters and use Shingled Magnetic Recording technology which allowed an increase in capacity of 25% per platter. The drives consume 7.5W when active and 5W when idle.
Although Seagate isn't the first manufacturer that offers 8TB disks, the drives are relatively cheap. An American shop lists the drive for $266.67, Amazon currently only offers a 20 pack at $5336 ( $266.80 per drive) which means the price per GB is about $0,033. A 8TB drive from HGST is currently listed at $979 on Amazon.com.
