If you do any sort of serious shooting these days you know that hard drive space quickly adds up. We are always looking for better (and bigger) options for images archival and storage, and if you are too, Seagate has a new drive you need to know about.
Seagate’s New 8TB Archival Drive Offers Serious Storage at an Affordable Price
Seagate launched their Archival line of drives earlier this year and they feature a new technology that allows them to pack more data onto the spinning platters that a normal spinning drive can. The benefit is ridiculous amounts of data for an super affordable price, and one downside is that they are not the speediest drives on the market – even compared to other spinning drives.
The latest version of these Archival drives is a whopping 8TB and is available for only $260! That means you are paying something like 3 cents per 1GB of data. This reminds me of when I bought my first 10GB drive for something like $200, and I remember thinking I would never need more space…
Unfortunately these new drives are not really available quite yet, unless you want to order a 20-pack for a cool $5,000 from Amazon. They should be on store shelves individually within the next couple of weeks though, so stay tuned and we will notify you.
What are your thoughts about Seagate’s Archival Drives? Do you archive your images personally or do you archive offsite to a datacenter or cloud service? Leave a comment below and let us know!
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I think this is the kind of drive I’d buy to back up my 16TB Drobo (or at least big chunks of it). Backup, sure, not really archival, though I do keep a backup off-site. I’m not sure I’d trust this class of drive for the RAID itself (a moot point for awhile since my Drobo only supports 4TB drives). Just one partition…
It’s kind of brave for any manufacturer to claim that a spinning platter, magnetically written, HDD is “archival”, considering that hard disks are prone to longevity shortcomings.
I wouldn’t buy into this as an “archival solution” unless somehow Seagate has made great strides in improving the lifespan of a traditional HDD.
=Matt=
My thoughts exactly.
I don’t trust any of these manufacturers any more, I’ve lost data with seagate and WD. The best thing you can do, is store your files on some kind of raid system and use another HD that you don’t connect to your computer often, just for that extra redundancy. Many people are also moving to cloud storage but personally, I haven’t warmed up to the idea for security reasons.
That’s why redundancy is a must when it come to protecting your bread and butter data, in any industry or business.
Cloud to me is highly dependent on the life of the company providing that service. That’s not a certainty. Best to create your own cloud service. Having an offsite server is better but that’s subject to another set of problems.
Seagate’s large capacity hard drives has a far higher fail rate than the others
Not really restricted to their large capacity drives… https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/
Also worth a read, given a previous article… http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/ssd-vs.-hdd-performance-and-reliability-1.html
Yup, exactly that and another report says it. Looking at their 2TB and above models, Seagate’s fail rate dramatically increases compared to the others. I stopped using Seagate from personal experience of multiple drive failures, esp. the Barracudas
Meh.
Seagate consumer drives are ehh. They had a bad batch of DM001/DM003 based drives with the clicking of death.
I run a few Seagate enterprise drives in both SAS and SATA variants and no problems there.
Personally no problems, with Seagate for me, although I still prefer Hitachi for enterprise stuff.
Good heavens, that’s a insane amount of memory for that price. Guess i can return those 3 drives I bought on Black Friday now.
wow that’s a lot of storage for images backup, wondering how many partitions I would split if I owned this one
I archive my images in three places – one local and two in the cloud, which are BackBlaze and Google Drive.