The competition is heating up at the top end of the hard disk drive market with Toshiba finally announcing its first 8TB hard disk drive, the X300, one aimed at the high performance market: that's nearly two years after Seagate first announced its model.

The drive sports a 7200RPM spinning speed, 128MB cache and uses Perpendicular Magnetic Recording and Tunnel Magneto-Resistive technologies: so no shingles (SMR) or helium magic here which means that higher capacity drives are likely to follow.

The X300 does also feature Advanced Format (AF) storage and supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing) plus some nifty internal shock sensor technology that improves the drive's resistance to knocks and vibration.

Toshiba will launch the drive next month with two year standard warranty and a suggested purchase price of £262 (about $380, AU$530). That's not such a bad price given that Seagate's model retails for 30% less almost two years on the market.

The latter though comes with a solid 3-year warranty although it is likely to have a lower performance due to a slightly slower rotational speed. The flip side is that power consumption on Seagate's drive is likely to be much lower.

We've asked Toshiba to tell us how many platters this drive has and will update the piecec as soon as we hear from them.