We are collecting more and more data, Pro Tools projects, video files, samples, and we need to be able to store all this stuff and also archive it.  This is a recent development from Seagate that provides a possibe solution that can store up to 8TB on one drive, passing the 6TB drive that Western Digital produced that needs to be helium filled to make it work. Seagate have produced a video explaining how it works.

What Is The Catch To Get 8TB?

The catch with the new Seagate Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drive is that its rotational speed is only 5900 rpm and average read/write speed 150MB/sec you’re looking at something that’s far slower than an average SSD drive  at around 1,800MB/sec and even the average 7,200 RPM hard drive. But that isn’t too much of an issue if we are lookng for archive drives. 

A Possible Archiving Solution?

I currently have around 10 hard drives of varying sizes as my archive storage and have been looking at being able to consolidate them and back them up too and the price per gig at aroud 3 cents makes these drives very appealing.

Two of these drives would provide me with all the archive space I need and would be very cost effective at around $260 for an 8TB drive. You could put these in RAID 5 arrays or just them as drives in a tower.