Seagate’s first shingled hard drives now shipping: 8TB for just $260

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.