Seagate's New 8TB Archive Hard Drive Is The Next Big Breakthrough In Our Lives

We all love talking about what we'll see in the Nikon D5 or what Phase One's next big announcement will be. But for the most part, as important as it is, there's not much fun in "real" tech. Networking, cloud storage, hard drives...that's all kind of boring? Definitely not first date material (not second, or third, or fourth either). But when something as monumental as this comes, it's important to consider. Bigger, cheaper hard drives mean more storage in less space, with less complications, and all while slimming your wallet (what else can do that outside of the digital world!?). Meet the Seagate 8TB Archive hard drive, announced back in August, but finally shipping to consumers next month.

Just a year ago, fitting six terabytes into a hard drive was considered a decent feat. It may not sound like it, but we really are beginning to approach very real and physical limits on what we can fit into a given space - even in the nanometer world on which bits of data live. The static and fairly high priced six-terabyte hard drives that were released within the last year are a testament to this.

Seagate's new Shingled Magnetic Recording technology is what lets it cram 33% more data in the same physical space by overlapping the bits on the new Archive-series drive, but it also slows down read and write speeds. Still, with such high platter density (that's the most "techy" this will get, don't worry), performance is impressive at 150MB/s. That's faster than your fastest USB 3.0 portable hard drives, and in a two-drive or four-drive RAID system as many working creatives have for editing and backup, it'll be plenty fast enough for Photoshop, Lightroom, and even some 4K video work.

It's also one of Seagate's most reliable consumer hard drives, rated for 24/7 operation with 800,000 MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) hours and 180TB of data transfer per year. That's a ton of data (500GB every single day); and if you calculate the mean time before failure, that's a solid 91 years of supposed operability. Something will probably happen before that, honestly, but you don't have to worry about this drive's reliability. These drives run cooler, with less power, and more securely than anything in their class. Each capacity option even has a model with built-in encryption for increased security (likely at the small cost of some speed) and features just about all of Seagates most advanced technologies.

For those planning a new backup system (or for those woken up by their new D810's massive storage needs), the Seagate 8TB Archive is a no-brainer. Don't need quite so much storage? Seagate will offer likely-competitively-priced 6TB and 5TB versions. The 8TB, however, will start at $260 when it ships this January (current pre-orders on Amazon through a third party reseller promise January 9th stock and indicate prices ranging from $228 to $266 for the 5TB and 8TB versions respectively, which would make the 8TB hard drive a no-brainer; but expect those and other street prices to shift one way or another closer to the new year. The good news is that hard drive space is now down from just around 3.75¢ per GB to just 3¢ per GB).

If you're about to order your new backup NAS or RAID editing system, wait just a little longer. If you can afford to, hold off for what will soon be even more affordable.