Seagate launches massive 8TB NAS HDD for SOHO, SMB, and creative professionals

Large hard drives are surprisingly controversial. In the world of computers, it is often assumed that larger capacity drives are a positive. For a long time, that was indisputably true. With that said, as drives grew to gargantuan proportions, critics were quick to point out that the larger the drive, the more you can potentially lose at failure. Those people will often suggest utilizing multiple smaller drives, combined with regular backups -- good advice.

Unfortunately, many businesses are limited in space physically -- there are only so many bays and connections for drives. It is for this reason that a larger HDD is preferable. Today, Seagate is launching a massive 8TB NAS HDD. While not the first HDD of this capacity, Seagate claims it is the largest-ever NAS optimized drive. Who is the drive for? The company says "small- and Medium-sized Businesses (SMB), Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and creative professional segments". Of course, there is no reason why it can't also be utilized by home users who value a high quality -- and high capacity -- NAS optimized drive.

"The Seagate NAS HDD 8TB is the largest NAS optimized drive on the market. That means businesses will require fewer drives -- and subsequently fewer expensive enclosures -- to meet their data storage needs. The new 8TB drives are designed for tower enclosures with one to eight bays, delivering up to 64TB in a single eight-bay desktop form factor. This high storage density gives small business the high capacity and flexibility to address the data challenges on the immediate horizon while preparing for the future", says Seagate.

The company further explains, "the new Seagate NAS 8TB HDD is optimized for a diverse set of NAS use cases including backup and disaster recovery, print and file servers, multimedia storage, archiving, file sharing and virtualization. In addition, industry-leading NAS manufacturers including ASUSTOR, QNAP, Synology and Thecus have qualified the NAS HDD 8TB for compatibility in a number of their products.

Seagate share the following features.

• Suitability for 1- to 8-bay enclosures
• 180TB/year Workload Rate Limit (WRL) -- the largest WRL for this category of NAS drive, offering businesses peace of mind that heavy workloads can be easily managed
• MTBF of 1M hour -- demonstrating mature robustness of the drive family
• Three-Year Limited Warranty -- peace of mind from a reliable NAS HDD
• One-of-kind optional three-year Rescue Data Recovery service to protect against potential data loss

If you don't need or want an 8TB NAS drive, don't worry; Seagate is also producing 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6TB capacities. Unfortunately, you cannot buy the 8TB NAS variant yet. The company has shipped the drive to a very select group of customers, but promises to make it more widely available towards the end of Q1 2016. Pricing, sadly, is a mystery, but more should be revealed later in the quarter.

What capacity NAS HDD do you currently use for storage? Is 8TB way more drive than you need, or can you actually fill it? Tell me your thoughts in the comments.