Seagate, using its new shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to cram more data into fewer platters, is preparing to launch an 8TB hard drive priced at just $260. For that low-low price (just over 3 cents per gig!) you get a three-year warranty and very low power consumption — but certainly not performance. This 8TB drive is all about long-term storage and backups — pair it with a new SSD like the Samsung 850 Pro or 850 Evo and you’d have a very flexible, cost-effective storage setup.

First, the speeds and feeds. This is a new range of hard drives that Seagate refers to as Archive HDD, where performance is eschewed in favor of reliability and power efficiency. There will be 8TB, 6TB, and 5TB models, and they’ll all come in Standard and Secure flavors (the Secure drives have a hardware encryption chip). The drives all spin at 5,900 RPM and have a 128MB cache, with an average read/write throughput of 150MB/sec (190MB/sec max). There’s a three-year warranty, and a fairly high MTBF (mean time between failures) of 800,000 hours.

The cheap and cheerful 8TB Archive HDD — model number ST8000AS0002, in case you were wondering — is only possible because of Seagate’s use of shingled magnetic recording. While all three of the big players (Western Digital, HGST, Seagate) have been sampling SMR in small quantities, I think the Archive HDD range will be the first commercial use of the technology. SMR is a technique that increases areal density, but reduces performance (compared to “conventional” perpendicular magnetic recording, anyway). For more on how SMR works, watch the video above or read our detailed explainer.

Ultimately, SMR allows Seagate to cram 1.33 terabytes onto a single platter — up from a pre-SMR areal density limit of around 1TB per platter. This means that Seagate can hit 8TB with just six platters, as opposed to seven or eight — which in turn reduces production costs, energy consumption, noise, vibration, temperature… you get the idea. The only issue is that you lose performance — but considering hard drives haven’t been about performance for a while now, that’s not really a big issue. The other option, which was pursued by Hitachi (now Western Digital-HGST), is to fill drives with helium, which achieves most of the same goals by reducing wind resistance around the platters — but so far, WD/HGST hasn’t managed to get its helium-filled drives down to a price that consumers can afford.

As you’ve probably surmised, an 8TB drive for $260 is pretty impressive in terms of cost-per-gigabyte — 3.25 cents per gig, to be exact. As it stands, the cheapest 6TB drives on Amazon or Newegg are around $280 — or about 4.5 cents per gig. And to think, I was worried that SSD/NAND flash density was going to overtake good ol’ hard drives!

As of the time of publishing, it seems Seagate’s Archive HDDs are currently being shipped to retailers. Amazon has some drives coming in stock on January 7, 2015 — and in fact, it will sell you a 20-pack of the drives for $5,336 ($267 each), if you wish. There are European retailers that will soon have stock in, priced at around €250. It looks like Seagate is targeting an official launch in January.

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