With hard drive manufacturers fighting to gain any advantage in the ever competitive HDD market, Seagate CEO Steve Luczo revealed last week that 8TB prototype HDDs have been delivered to key enterprise customers for testing.
'We have also delivered 8TB customer development units to major customers and cloud service providers, and the initial customer feedback has been very positive," Luczo said. "While it’s still early in the development of our Kinetic object-based storage platform, we are in deep technical discussions with a very broad base of enterprise customers. We believe our focus on developing key values for object-based storage will make the Kinetic platform a differentiated offering in the cloud storage marketplace."
The highest capacity we have previously seen is HGST's 6TB Ultrastar He6 helium-filled HDDs; a year ago the company said it had shipped 7TB drives for testing also but we haven't seen those being sold. What everyone wants to know is what technology Seagate is using to build the 8TB HDD, along with pricing and availability, but Luczo did not provide those details.
The only thing we can assume is that it will be a while before an 8TB HDD will be available to consumers.
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