Seagate informed us today that they are launching a series of three families of huge capacity, 8TB HDDs. Targeted at the most demanding enterprise users, Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is supposed to provide extremely high reliability, very large capacity per drive and what Seagate claims will be up to a 100 percent increase in random read/write performance. Now, fair enough about the capacity claim, performance figures would be amazing if realistic, but what strikes us as particularly important is the high reliability claim. 

You're aware surely that Seagate has had issues with reliability in the past several years. Some cloud storage providers have even publicly stated that they will not be featuring Seagate drives because they have proven to be the least reliable among their competitors. So let's hope that Seagate has really managed to make a giant leap forward in that regard. Competition is always good for us.

Aside from the Enterprise focused drives, there is also an Enterprise NAS HDD, which in spite of its name seems more targeted to SMEs with limited rack space, or even desktop NAS boxes with between 2 and 8 drives. The capacity increase from 6 to 8 TB per drive will surely be felt in that scenario.

Last but not least, there is the Kinetic HDD series, which aims to reduce total cost of ownership for organisations with large data storage needs. This is evidenced by a quote from none other than the magical European research organisation CERN:

"I am impressed by the disk capacity increase achieved by Seagate," said Dirk Duellmann, deputy leader of the data and storage services group in the IT department at CERN. "As part of our collaboration through CERN openlab, we are aiming to demonstrate with Seagate the expected TCO and scalability benefits of Kinetic drives. These tests are being performed within the 100PB-scale storage setups that CERN deploys for the Large Hadron Collider."