Just when we were starting to get comfortable with the thought of 6TB hard drives, Seagate goes and announces their lineup of 8TB HDDs:

Now before you get too excited about throwing one of these into your desktop, realize that these models are meant for enterprise and larger NAS environments:

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As you can see from the above chart, Seagate will be moving to 8TB maximum capacities on their 'Enterprise NAS' and 'Enterprise Capacity 3.5' models, which are meant for larger storage deployments.

Home and small business users opting to go with Seagate for their storage will remain limited to 4TB per drive for the time being.

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For those curious about Kinetic, this is Seagate's push to connect arrays of drives via standard Ethernet, which would allow specialized storage applications to speak directly to the raw storage via standard network gear. Kinetic HDDs are currently limited to 4TB, with 8TB planned this coming January.

Seagate's full press blast appears after the break.

SEAGATE DELIVERS INDUSTRY’S BROADEST PORTFOLIO OF 8TB HARD DRIVES 

New Enterprise Capacity 3.5, Enterprise NAS and Kinetic HDDs Reach New Highs in Capacity, Reliability, and Lower Total Cost of Ownership for Multiple Market Segments

CUPERTINO, CA – Sept. 1, 2015 – Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in storage solutions, today unveiled its new portfolio of 8TB high capacity drives – the Seagate® Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD, Seagate® Enterprise NAS HDD and Seagate® Kinetic HDD. The new drives provide small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises with the world’s highest capacity, most reliable, and highest performance storage solutions available, all optimized to match the unique storage requirements for each market segment.

“Customers today need storage solutions to support a diverse, and sometimes very specialized, set of applications and workload requirements,” said Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at Seagate. “In designing our products, we look closely at the type of data being stored, performance needs, power requirements, environmental operating conditions, network topologies, uptime demand and more, to ensure our customers receive the right storage technology for the job. This thoughtful approach has enabled us to deliver the most compelling 8TB portfolio available in the industry.”

Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD— World-Class Reliability Meets High-Capacity 

Within the cloud and traditional enterprise markets, businesses need high capacity and extremely reliable data storage solutions. Seagate’s 8TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD drive addresses these needs by incorporating proven conventional magnetic recording hard drive technology, backed by nine generations of data center innovation. Enterprise customers also want world class performance from their storage solutions and the 8TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD delivers for them with a 100 percent increase in random read/write performance compared to previous generations, driving a vast improvement in IT performance across the enterprise. 

“Supermicro’s wide array of SuperServer and SuperStorage solutions deliver unrivaled performance, efficiency, density and reliability for enterprise, data center, cloud and HPC environments,” said Don Clegg, vice president of marketing and business development at Supermicro. “With Seagate's new portfolio of 8TB 3.5” Enterprise and Kinetic HDD we can cost-effectively address expanding web scale storage requirements with the most advanced Green Computing platforms on the market.”

Enterprise NAS HDD— Enterprise Capacity Meets SMBs 

Small- and medium-sized businesses require high reliability too, but they also need storage solutions that can scale to support enterprise class performance as business mandates change and the company grows. Seagate’s 8TB Enterprise NAS HDD takes conventional hard drive recording technology to the next level by providing one third more storage density for any tower or rack mount solution compared to the previous 6TB generation drive. This density advantage translates to fewer drives without sacrificing capacity, reducing power consumption and saving valuable space in servers and data centers to help improve IT cost structures and service value to the organization.

Kinetic HDD— High-Capacity, Reduced Cloud Economics

For organizations making the transition to the cloud with an eye to leveraging open source innovation, the 8TB Kinetic HDD focuses on total cost of ownership (TCO) by emphasizing scaled-out storage and rapid deployment in data centers. In cases where archiving data is a priority, emerging technologies such as Shingled Magnetic Recording can be of strategic and business value. Combined with the Kinetic Open Storage platform, this storage solution can change the TCO equation.

“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.”

The platform reduces TCO by redefining and greatly simplifying storage architectures for today’s use-case scenarios. By combining an open source object storage protocol with Ethernet connectivity, Kinetic HDD eliminates multiple layers of legacy hardware and software infrastructure with a simple Key/Value interface. This in turn eliminates or dramatically reduces the need for traditional storage servers reducing capital equipment costs, power consumption and human expenses associated with managing storage for a total savings of up to 70 percent.

All drives are currently sampling to select customers with wide scale availability planned for late this year. For more information on the Seagate 8TB high capacity storage please visit www.seagate.com/8TBhdd.