Apple News: 2014 at 10:55PM

Seagate today announced the world's first eight terabyte hard drive, designed to provide high capacity storage for private and cloud-based data centers. The single 3.5-inch hard disk drive surpasses the storage capacity of previously available hard drives, including 6 TB HDDs from both Western Digital and Seagate itself.

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Unlike similar high-capacity offerings from Western Digital, Seagate does not use helium in either its 6 TB HDD or its new 8 TB offering. While Seagate has not released the details behind the 8 TB drive, it's likely the HDD uses Seagate's shingled magnetic recording technology, which, according to the company, adds more than 25 percent capacity growth by maximizing the number of tracks per inch on a single disk.

Seagate says that its new 8 TB HDD also uses fewer components to make it more power efficient, which ultimately lowers power costs for enterprise customers.

A cornerstone for growing capacities in multiple applications, the 8TB hard drive delivers bulk data storage solutions for online content storage providing customers with the highest capacity density needed to address an ever increasing amount of unstructured data in an industry-standard 3.5-inch HDD. Providing up to 8TB in a single drive slot, the drive delivers maximum rack density, within an existing footprint, for the most efficient data center floor space usage possible.

The 8TB hard disk drive increases system capacity using fewer components for increased system and staffing efficiencies while lowering power costs. With its low operating power consumption, the drive reliably conserves energy thereby reducing overall operating costs. Helping customers economically store data, it boasts the best Watts/GB for enterprise bulk data storage in the industry.

Seagate is currently shipping the drives to select numbers with wide scale availability coming next quarter. The company did not release pricing on the drives.