8TB Hard Drives Already Deployed For Cloud Storage

6TB helium filled hard drives are the biggest consumer storage drives available on the market right now, with both Seagate and Western Digital offering products in this category. Seagate are still opting for a traditional build on their drives, but the Western Digital HGST drives are hermetically sealed with a helium environment to reduce friction on their drives. Regardless of their methods, both companies are already pushing the limits again for the next generation of mechanical and SSD drives.

Seagate are already pushing for 10TB drives, and have stated in their recent quarterly conference call that they’ve already delivered shipments of 8TB HDD units to customers for cloud storage and other high capacity applications.

This means that we should see 8TB hitting enterprise markets by 2015 and I expect the more consumer friendly end of the market towards the end of 2015 and start of 2016 – by which time it is expected that 10TB+ drives will be deploying to cloud servers and other applications, much like they’re currently doing with the 8TB drives.

Thank you Forbes for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Forbes