Seagate births 8TB triplets and a 2TB mobile nipper Who says spinning rust is finished? Seagate has rolled out 8TB triplets and a 2TB mobile nipper, using shingled recording on its 8TB Kinetic. The three 8TB disks use ninth generation perpendicular magnetic recording, and represent a 33.3 per cent capacity uplift on the existing 6TB technology that Seagate uses in its 3.5-inch …
Not just the drives themselves, I found of three Seagate External HDDs, on two of them the usb socket came loose and disappeared into the chassis. I had to pry the 'cheap; brittle cases open and used the drives as internals until both of those failed less than a year after that. In comparison I've have three Western Digital 'Elements' Range drives since that have outlasted them by 3+ years.
After the Thailand floodings, the three hard disk vendors have blamed shortage to keep the prices of HDD artificially high. But this oligypoly is just constructed. In fact, the year of the shorting the HDD vendors posted record profits and shipped more disks than ever. Still the HDD prices are very high. If SSDs win and HDD die, I would not shed a tear. Just google a bit for more information
http://news.softpedia.com/news/HDD-Crisis-Was-Fake-Seagate-and-Western-Digital-Post-Big-Profits-266676.shtml
Not stupid, just ignorant of the way hard drive heads work: the height of the head (which is critical - if that is wrong the drive fails!) is determined by aerodynamics. The head flies just barely above the surface of the disc, never touching, held aloft by the rush of air (or helium) as the drive spins.
Or have a good backup strategy in place if you plan on using these. When I see a single drive of this capacity I always think "What a great way to lose a lot of data in one fell swoop."
Spinning rust may not be dead, but it's getting more and more irrelevant, and me thinks that's a good thing.
That was true when the biggest harddrive you could get was 80GB (or 8GB, or 8MB), and it'll still be true when we can buy 8TB SSDs (probably in the next year or so).
You should always have a backup of difficult/impossible to replace data.
(oh, and RAID is not a backup)
Great to see some genuine movement at last. It seems like years since we have seen a capacity increase. Hell, it is years, and way too many of them.
None of these drives is of general interest - i.e., all three are specialised items for particular, narrowly defined uses - but we now have reasonable grounds to anticipate a long overdue lift in capacities of standard drives. Seagate's brilliant 750MB and 1TB laptop drives have given great service, but they are way too small. Put me first in the queue for a 2TB 2.5 inch hybrid as soon as they make it. (It's even tempting to look at the 2TB drive announced today, but it would seem like a terrible slug after the luxury of a hybrid.) Bigger desktop drives will be more than welcome too.
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