While some internet pundits have been decreeing the death of hard drives for some time now, obviously Seagate did not get the memo. Instead they have continued to show why when businesses need data to be stored in an easily accessible medium, professional’s reach for Seagate Hard Disk Drives.
The great thing about Seagate continuously redefining what hard drives are capable of is that it does trickle down to the rest of the market – including the home user market. For example, this drive maybe designed with near-line data processing in mind, but as we saw in testing this hard drive in and out of RAID is incredibly fast and offers application, and game load times that are encroaching in on SSHD and even older generation SSD territory.
Equally important is while it is (slightly) disappointing to see that this drive does not rely upon exotic sounding technologies like HAMR the fact of the matter is that the technology used in this drive is proven and extremely reliable…. and when dealing with 8 Terabytes of data, stability and reliability are paramount.
The only issue that anyone can have with this new ECC v5 model is the asking price. As with the v4 series before it the 8TB v5 does redefine the term ‘expensive’. For the typical home user, even just thinking about purchasing one Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v5 8TB is going to require a lot of thought. However, it is hard to blame this drive for this, as this series is not built with home users in mind; rather they are meant for corporations who care more about long term costs than they do about upfront costs. To this end these drives are built to such exacting standards, and go through so much extra factory testing, that yes they deserve to be more expensive than their consumer brethren.
To perfectly candid, and even excluding the massive performance this new series has to offer, the seemingly ‘huge’ price premium is anything but massive when you actually run the numbers. For example, to find the equivalent capacity in Western Digital branded models, consumers would have to purchase two Western Digital RE 4TB drives. Each of those drive retail for about $235; require over twice the power; produce over twice the amount of heat and noise; take up twice the number of ports….and are twice as likely to have one fail (as the rule of thumb is to take the MTBF and divide it by the total number of drives used). In the grand scheme of things an extra $35 to negate all those issues is not that big a deal.
In the end there are a lot of reason to like this new v5 and very, very few to dislike it. Even if you can’t afford the ‘flagship’ capacity version of the new Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v5 series, we do think you should give a lot of thought over the new Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v5 series. All will have that legendary quality and durability that made Seagate famous, and all will be darn impressive drives in their own right.
