back to article 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 …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One page !

    All that on one easy-to-read page. Thank you !

  2. UncleDave
    Mushroom

    Don't care

    If they store a gazillion Gb and Seagate pays me to use them. To many wasted hours over failed Seagate drives!

    1. CatoTheCat

      Re: Don't care

      Amen to that. 4x 3TB drives, all replaced at least once. The last one that came back from the Dutch repair centre lasted a single week. Switched to WD and not a problem since (6months).

      1. Aitor 1

        Re: Don't care

        The Seagate 3TB debacle is widely known. You could ask backblaze about it...

    2. Salts

      Re: Don't care

      Have avoided them since there 1-2Gb days they looked so slim and sexy, but they went tick, tick, tick after only a few months!

  3. Teiwaz

    Lost at Sea(gate)

    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.

    1. Aitor 1

      Re: Lost at Sea(gate)

      They went as fas as disabling NCQ on some USB 3.0 3TB drives... and still got 2 defective ones.

  4. PlinkerTind

    HDD crisis was fake

    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

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Re: HDD crisis was fake

      Just because they made more money and shipped more drives than the year before, doesn't mean that the crisis was a scam.

      Without the flooding they'd have sold even more drives and made squillions.

  5. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Call me stoopid but wouldn't it be cheaper (and better) filling the disks with a vacuum rather than helium? A vacuum withstands heat better (very poor thermal transference) and there's no nasty atoms floating around to bounce off delicate heads.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Yes, but then they totally suck once the seal breaks.

    2. Tannin

      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.

    3. xybyrgy

      Cushion of gas

      IIRC, the heads ride on a cushion of gas; in a vacuum the heads would crash...

  6. Matt_payne666

    These look promising, but again I'm another chap with a pile of dead and decaying 3TB disks...

    It will take a while before my money moves from WD back to Seagate.

    Seagate, maybe presenting a trade up from your train wreck drives might help garner some customer faith...

  7. Mr Dogshit
    Headmaster

    Since when is "to birth" a verb?

    Eh?

    1. Kepler
      Facepalm

      Re: Since when is "to birth" a verb?

      Since Butterfly McQueen used it in Gone with the Wind?

  8. Unicornpiss
    Meh

    Better buy at least 2 and RAID them...

    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.

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Better buy at least 2 and RAID them...

      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)

  9. Tannin

    Movement at last

    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Movement at last

      The 2 TB's are what I'd like to see more of. I developed a fondness for ISAM a long time ago and these would work well in my removables. I already have an abundance of SSD's (mix and match) but done right an SSHD would be interesting as well.

    2. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: Movement at last

      Interesting that USB memory sticks have reached 1TB now.

      I had an 80MB HDD once and it was the largest capacity anyone had ever seen at the time, I didn't think I could ever fill the whole disk and I never did.

  10. xbit

    I'm getting a kick out of these replies as only last night I had replace a dead 3TB Seagate drive. Its 'twin' died last year too. Thank God for backups.

    Never again though.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like