INTRODUCTION

   How many of you recall the days when even 340MB of storage space was the highest one could find and consumers had lots of brands they could choose a drive from (well at least in most places on the planet) including Seagate, WD, IBM, Quantum and Maxtor? Well since then (over 15 years ago) things have changed a lot so aside the fact that Seagate and WD are the two largest players right now (for example Quantum was bought by Maxtor which in turn was bought by Seagate) storage capacities have skyrocketed up to a crazy 10TB (10TB=10000000MB). Of course technology never stops progressing so we all knew that this day would eventually come although it did arrive earlier than some expected. Unfortunately as we all know in order to own the latest and highest capacity model you need to spend quite a bit especially if you're looking for a durable HDD with the best possible read/write performance. The good news however is that thanks to Seagate people who place capacity and durability before performance now have a HDD they can turn to and its name is the Archive HDD.

   Founded in 1979, Seagate is the leading provider of hard drives and storage solutions. From the videos, music and documents we share with friends and family on social networks, to servers that form the backbone of enterprise data centers and cloud-based computing, to desktop and notebook computers that fuel our personal productivity, Seagate products help more people store, share and protect their valuable digital content. Seagate offers the industry’s broadest portfolio of hard disk drives, solid-state drives and solid-state hybrid drives. In addition, the company offers an extensive line of retail storage products for consumers and small businesses, along with data-recovery services for any brand of hard drive and digital media type. Seagate employs more than 50,000 people around the world.

   The Archive HDD is currently available in 5, 6 and 8TB models and is aimed primarily towards large-scale data centers and users (mostly professionals) who require lots of space for backup purposes. To that end Seagate focused more in reliability than performance with the Archive HDD line so this time over they've used Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology to produce higher platter density (maximizes the number of tracks per inch) and provide increased data protection since aside the usual cache (128MB for this model) which can improve performance and is also used in HDD models this drive also makes use of on-drive cache (almost 20GB in size) for inbound writes and garbage collection something which is not actually new since it's been used in SSDs. Still we're all quite curious to see how the latest Archive HDD 8TB HDD (ST8000AS0002) performs, aren't you?