Just like our 32oz coffee mug says, Size Matters. Just as this holds true for our morning caffeine injection so too does it hold true in the world of computing. The fact of the matter is consumers are figuratively drowning in data – data that needs to be store on something besides the ‘cloud’. While in a perfect world all that data would be stored first on tape for long term storage, and Solid State for short term, the reality is most of that data will end up on the true workhorse of the industry: Hard Disk Drives.
Hard Disk Drives’ price to performance, and even its price per gigabyte ratio are simply unbeatable. In other words, the only place to truly find value in the storage marketplace is in the Hard Disk Drive sector. Sadly, most Enterprise consumers – and PC enthusiasts alike, not only want a great value, they also want a massive drive that is blazingly fast. Now that is a tall order.
However, what if we told you that right now you can find a single hard drive that offers speeds in excess of 200MB/s for well over 3 Terabytes of its capacity and will never get slower than 110MB/s? What if we could also tell you that you could offline two 4TB drives and replace it with just one of these new models; and even compared against one 4TB it would uses noticeably less power?
If this was even just late 2014 that indeed would be an impossible order; however, it is not 2014 nor even 2015. It is now 2016 and the impossible has now not only become possible but practical. This is all thanks to the new ‘v5’ refresh of Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD series. While the ‘v4’ model tapped out at an impressive 6TB via six 1TB platter, this new series has boosted aerial density to 1.25TB per platter and as such is now one of the very few eight Terabyte drives available today. More importantly thanks to its more conservative approach to design, this unit is not filled with exotic gasses, nor does it rely on untested technology like HAMR (heat assisted magnetic recording). Instead this is a drive that is meant for storing a lot of data in a small package, while ensuring that all that data is -relatively- quick to access.
Mix in an asking price of only six cents per Gigabyte with a five-year warranty, and on paper this new series seems tailor made for PC gaming enthusiasts who have mutli, mutli Terabyte Steam & Origin collections, and Enterprise professionals who have near-line data in need of instant gratification.
Since this model is targeted more towards professional consumers – such as workstation using professionals – rather than home storage enthusiast we have obtained not one but two samples for this review. This way we can show you not only what it can do on its own, but what this new series can offer all consumers in RAID scenarios.
