Pre-order 8TB Seagate HDD for $249 (expected to ship in March)

[DPI]

After some time researching these 1.33TB platter SMR drives, I decided to take a pass. Seems like rewriting sectors starts to ask for trouble that I don't need. The price is this low probably to entice guinea pigs. Think instead I will wait for helium-based drives to drop in price and stick with 5TB 1TB platter drives in the interim.

The price isn't really that low, and their SMR tech has been in testing for years, with these drives specifically being in the hands of third parties - strategic partners, data hosting and cloud providers - under NDA testing for more than a year, so the guinea pig assumption is a little uninformed. They didn't suddenly start mass producing these just to solicit feedback from PC enthusiasts on forums in the hopes they determine SMR viable for storing their music and movies.

A specific market segment were targeted with these drives: Enterprise scenarios, cloud hosting providers, large hyper-scale environments with massive object-store filesystems that can distribute parity data without the use of RAID. Basically, usage scenarios that benefit from higher data densities and where access patterns are read-focused.