Seagate has just last week begun shipping the worlds first 8TB hard disk drive.Seagate is shipping its 8TB drives to select enterprise customers right now with general availability for the enterprise-class storage slated for the fall.

The 8TB uses a standard 3.5" form factor and 6Gbps SATA interface. It's targeted at datacenters, cloud-based services, and bulk data storage—and it has the rotational vibration tolerance typical of drives designed to slot into tightly packed servers. That's pretty much the extent of what Seagate is revealing about the drive right now, though.

One of those things Seagate has been unwilling to reveal is the price, however we suspect this will be anounced once the drive is released to the whole market.

Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at the company: "As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centres, Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the world’s first 8TB HDD, a ground-breaking new solution for meeting the increased capacities needed to support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage. As to other details, Seagate isn't providing any. An educated guess however would suggest this could be the next iteration of Seagate's SMR technology on the 5K Terascale platform. As Seagate suggests the drive is meant for archiving, their SMR technology and low-power slow spindle speed makes sense. While the drives may be technically shipping, they're more likely in what's called "directed availability," going to more forgiving customers with specific use cases where these drives make sense rather than into the market at large.

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