Western Digital Infuses Consumer HDDs with HGST HelioSeal Tech - Increases Capacity to 8TB

[SirMaster]

Looks like a slew of new 8TB WD products have hit the market or will hit the market in about a month.

http://www.wdc.com/en/8tb/

$299 MSRP which seems nice and exactly double the current normal price of the 4TB WD Red. Except these new disks are double the density which usually comes at a price premium and will also be lower power usage and thus lower heat which is a nice bonus too.

Whats even better is that they will be available for $240 at the WD edu store which is $30/TB.

Looks like the WD purchase of HGST is paying off and looks like they use the same HGST tech in the new WD disks.

 

[mattbbpl]

Sweet, it looks like we're still on track to meet the targeted 20% year-over-year growth in hardware capacity.

Should be plenty of time to make an upgrade worthwhile by the time I need it.

 

[Ericloewe]

Why did they feel the need to go with Helium for 8TB? I'm rather certain that they're up to 8TB on 5 platters.

 

[SirMaster]

Nah, Seagate has 8TB Desktop and NAS disks made from 6 1.33TB platters. These are 8th generation PMR platters. Historically Seagate has been much quicker to incorporate the latest generation of platters into their disks.

WD for their 6TB disks use 5 1.2TB platters and for their 5TB disks use 4 1.25TB platters which are 7th generation platters. I have not seen any 6-platter WD disks, or WD using any > 1.25TB 8th generation platters yet.

These new WD disks use HGST's thinner platters for 7 ~1.15TB platters inside.

They probably just wanted to utilize their HGST acquisition to move to helium so that they can then work on incorporating 8th and 9th generation platters into their 7-platter helium disks to get to 10TB, 12TB, and 14TB PMR disks.

 

[Ste]

I've seen the threads here that discuss the unsuitability of the 8TB Seagate Archive drives, but I haven't found anything that specifically discusses the suitability of the 8TB WD Red NAS drives. I have a disk-less FreeNAS Mini, that I was planning to fill with 6TB WD Red drives, because I noted that iXsystems doesn't sell Minis with the 8TB drives, but I thought I'd ask here, anyway, as perhaps that Mini configuration just hasn't hit store shelves yet (when I bought my first Mini, they didn't sell a version with the 6TB drives, and now they do, so perhaps the 8TB version is in the pipeline).

Is there a technical reason why I shouldn't put 4 of these in my Mini?

 

[jgreco]

Is there a technical reason why I shouldn't put 4 of these in my Mini?

Because we'll all come visit you and suck the helium out of your drives so we can have a squeaky voice party?

Or maybe it's just better to let someone else be the guinea pig when there's lots of dollars in drives involved.

But to answer your question, there's probably no TECHNICAL reason.

 

[Z300M]

Looks like a slew of new 8TB WD products have hit the market or will hit the market in about a month.

http://www.wdc.com/en/8tb/

$299 MSRP which seems nice and exactly double the current normal price of the 4TB WD Red. Except these new disks are double the density which usually comes at a price premium and will also be lower power usage and thus lower heat which is a nice bonus too.

Whats even better is that they will be available for $240 at the WD edu store which is $30/TB.

Looks like the WD purchase of HGST is paying off and looks like they use the same HGST tech in the new WD disks.

Price shows as $345 @ WD today. And $375 @ NewEgg.

 

[jgreco]

Price shows as $345 @ WD today. And $375 @ NewEgg.

Been that way for a little while. Not unusual when introducing a new top-of-the-line drive. Wait a month or three.